Download The United States and Haiti, 1791-1863: A Racialized Foreign Policy

THE UNITED STATES AND HAITI, 1791-1863:
A RACIALIZED FOREIGN POLICY AND ITS DOMESTIC CORRELATES
Jonathan E. Bosscher
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green
State University in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
August 2008
Committee:
Douglas J. Forsyth, advisor
Scott C. Martin
ii
ABSTRACT
Douglas J. Forsyth, Advisor
The Haitian Revolution represents a truly unique moment in world history.
Between 1789 and 1804 a colony composed primarily of black plantation slaves
overthrew their white masters and with them a well-established political and economic
system. Founding a new state composed of and led by free blacks, the Haitian Revolution
succeeded in this respect against all odds and the best efforts of the leading imperial
powers. The largely reactionary policies of the United States which resulted from this
event suggest a need for further investigation. The Haitian Revolution clearly touched a
raw nerve in American domestic politics and society, bringing into view apparent
divisions in these spheres on a range of topics, with race relations foremost among them.
In the face of the Haitian Revolution, American foreign policy took a number of
seemingly contradictory turns, ultimately resulting in the non-recognition of Haiti for
years to come. Scholarship in this area has clearly revealed the influence of Southern
slaveholders who succeeded in applying a racist ideology in order to effectively isolate
Haiti from the United States. Despite various and compelling counter-interests, their
proponents never mobilized extensively enough to pose a significant threat to the agenda
of Southern conservatives until the outbreak of the Civil War.
A study of the development of Haiti as an object of ideological and symbolic
importance in American politics reveals the important role it played in fueling both sides
of the increasingly sectional divide over race and the future of slavery in the United
States. By tracing the evolution of U.S. policy and thought on Haiti, a new perspective on
iii
America’s long and painful journey out of slavery is proposed; one that exists at the
intersection of racial politics and the construction of foreign policy.
iv
PREFACE
This topic of this thesis, originally conceived nearly two and a half years ago, is
the result of the collision of three subjects, all critical to any understanding of American
history, that have always fascinated me. First, the role of race in U.S. society is one that,
though universally considered to be of central importance, is constantly undergoing
reinterpretation. The second, the formulation of foreign policy, was no less important in
the eighteenth and nineteenth century than it is today. Finally, the study of revolutionary
change, throughout history, has always elicited my interest, and the transformation
brought about by the Haitian Revolution was revolutionary indeed – not just for the
inhabitants of that nation, but for the world as well. This thesis exists at the intersection
of these three subjects as they applied to the early history of the United States.
At the time of this writing, the United States electorate considers its first black
president. In light of this development, itself the product of immense transformations in
American society, the political discourse of the U.S. in the years leading up to the Civil
War can seem so distant. In this thesis I have attempted to both close that gap for the
reader by making the events discussed herein seem close at hand through the use of
primary sources, while at the same time keeping my boundless interest in current events a
non-factor in the interpretation I advance. While it is for the reader to determine the
extent to which I have succeeded in this endeavor, I also know that even the best
historians often come up short in this regard.
In conceptualizing this study, in gathering the materials, and in honing my
argument, I have indebted myself to so many. First and foremost, I must thank my
advisor Dr. Douglas Forsyth, during whose policy history course I first conceived this
v
thesis. Without his boundless patience, incisive questions, and astute mentorship this
study would not have been possible. I must also express my thanks and appreciation for
the assistance of Dr. Scott Martin whose constructive criticism and deep knowledge of
early U.S. history have improved this study immensely. Any flaws in the present work
are mine alone and largely reflect my inability to enact all of their advice.
Thanks also to Ms. Mary Huth, whose expertise and assistance in locating
materials at the Department of Rare Books and Special Collection at the University of
Rochester were invaluable to my research. Everyone in the History Department as well as
the BGSU community – friends, colleagues, and professors – who have listened to me
discuss this study or even provided a sympathetic ear when I found it necessary to vent
about the drudgery of historical research are also deserving of credit. Finally, I must
thank my good friend Gwen Foster who corrected my translations of all of the French
language documents employed in this thesis. Every French quote included herein, though
initially translated by me, has been checked for accuracy by Gwen.
My graduate studies at BGSU were partly financed by a generous assistantship at
the Institute for Child and Family Policy under the capable leadership of Dr. Laura
Landry-Meyer.
Jonathan E. Bosscher
Bowling Green State University
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………….......1
CHAPTER 1……………………………………………………………………………..10
CHAPTER 2……………………………………………………………………………..28
CHAPTER 3……………………………………………………………………………..47
CHAPTER 4……………………………………………………………………………..71
CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………….87
BIBILIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………92
1
INTRODUCTION
This thesis examines the intersection of race and foreign policy in the early
history of the United States through an examination of the event that brought these two
issues toward an unavoidable collision: the Haitian Revolution and the sociopolitical
fallout that attended it until the American Civil War. Two developments – one in the
study of international relations, the other in the scholarship devoted to American history –
provide much of the conceptual basis for the present investigation of the pre-Civil War
foreign policy of the United States.
First, like the inquiries of most contemporary historians, as well as political
scientists, this study proceeds from the premise that American interactions with the world
at large “have seldom been divorced from their sociocultural milieu.” 1 As with all nationstates, domestic conflicts, anxieties, and pressures have in large part contributed to the
formation of U.S. foreign policy since the country’s inception. To be sure, developments
abroad, as in the success of Haiti’s slave revolt, have dramatically impacted American
policy-making but were always viewed in the context of – and acted upon in conjunction
with – the internal social and political issues of the time.
Second, beginning in the 1960s, historians of American slavery moved away from
both the traditionalist and revisionist schools of thought to embrace an interpretation
stressing the centrality of institutions such as slavery to much of American history. Race
and the black experience are thus regarded “as a key to the meaning of the American
experience.” 2
1
Alexander DeConde, Ethnicity and American Foreign Policy: A History (Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1992), x.
2
Robert Starobin, “The Negro: a central theme in American History,” Journal of Contemporary History 3
(1968): 37; see also, Earl E. Thorpe, The Central Theme of Black History. (Durham: Seeman Printery,
2
If the nature of race relations is a central theme in American history and an
essential part of the “sociocultural milieu” integral to the construction of American
foreign policy, the Haitian slave insurrection of 1791 and the events which followed from
it provide an excellent opportunity to examine the way the problem of race was
conceived of and dealt with prior to the abolition of slavery. Although organized
abolitionist groups would not gain substantial momentum in the United States until the
1830s, the legitimacy of slavery had long been contested. The principles manifested in
the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, which would later
provide much of the intellectual framework for abolitionism, added to the tension
between American ideals and the reality of its society. This state of apprehension as to
the future of slavery in America would persist until the cataclysm of civil war thoroughly
destroyed it. While racism would persist for generations, the peculiar institution was
shattered.
Just as the ideals espoused by many American revolutionaries seemed ostensibly
to challenge the validity of slavery, a far more jarring affront to the principles on which
slavery rested – white hegemony and superiority – came with the Haitian Revolution. In
1791, hundreds of thousands of black slaves rose against their white and mulatto masters,
inaugurating thirteen years of racial warfare that left the colony devastated and most of its
whites dead or in exile. What immediately followed in the United States were attempts to
insulate the slave-holding regions of the country from a similar fate as well as efforts to
1969); Melissa V. Harris-Lacewell, “The Heart of the Politics of Race: Centering Black People in the Study
of White Racial Attitudes,” Journal of Black Studies, 34 (2003); Nell Irvin Painter, Creating Black
Americans: African-American History and its Meanings, 1619 to the Present. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006); Ama Mazama, “The Afrocentric Paradigm: Contours and Definitions.” Journal of
Black Studies, 31 (2001), 387-405.
3
assist the former French colony’s disaffected planters with whom many whites identified.
Additionally, Haiti, with its enormous economic importance, was seen by U.S. policymakers as an arena in which the United States could and must play the game of greatpower politics as it competed with Britain, France and Spain.
Most relevant to this study, however, was the way the construction of a foreign
policy in regard to Haiti became a stage on which to play out the drama of American
anxieties over its own slave society as it approached the terminal crisis of American
slavery. While many U.S. political actors sought to establish “a proslavery foreign
policy” immediately following the Haitian slave revolt, the course of the policy leading
up to the Civil War is much more complex than a simple reflection of Southern racism. 3
In fact, U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis Haiti became a battleground upon which opponents
and proponents of American slavery would trade barbs. As such, this study seeks to
employ American foreign policy as a lens through which to view the development of the
domestic debate over slavery. While the policies enacted under the Washington and
Jefferson administrations largely reflected racism and an effort to preserve slavery,
Haitian-American relations would later come to be quite sensitive to public opinion as
well as the divisions in Congress, as these factors related to American slavery. The
connection is evidenced by the increase in calls for formal recognition of Haiti leading up
to the Civil War as abolitionists gained political power and more forcefully expressed
themselves. Ultimately, Haiti was recognized when, after the war broke out, there were
no Southern members left in Congress to veto such efforts.
3
Tim Matthewson, A Proslavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during the Early Republic
(Westport: Praeger, 2003).
4
While the course of American foreign policy toward Haiti has been studied for
almost a century – and American slavery even longer – no study has yet achieved an
understanding of the complex intersection of both these issues; one that goes beyond the
simplicity of Southern racism and reaction; beyond Northern economic interests and
budding abolitionism. By viewing America’s struggle with slavery through its response
to the Haitian Revolution parts of the traditional narrative of the antebellum period must
be reevaluated. For example, most historians agree that American abolitionism lacked the
cohesiveness that existed among such movements in European countries until at least
forty years after the outbreak of rebellion in Haiti. Moreover, the violence of the revolt
and rampant racism prevented the formation of anything resembling a pro-Haitian lobby.
Nevertheless, some in power acted upon their abolitionist sympathies almost immediately
by opposing the interests of Southern planters whose tremendous anxieties as to the
future of American slavery were actuated by the slave insurrection in Haiti. At times,
these political actors were willing to behave more forcefully in the arena of foreign policy
than they were willing to push on domestic matters, in an effort to reign in Southern
political influence upon the latter. While proslavery forces would initially dominate U.S.
foreign policy toward Haiti, the years leading to the Civil War paid witness to a
concurrent increase in tension over relations with the black republic.
Haiti forces us not only to reevaluate the rise of American abolitionism but the
role the Western Hemisphere’s second independent nation played in the formation of
black nationalism among free blacks in the United States. African-Americans often
looked upon Haiti and its leaders with pride, celebrating the revolution for both its
concrete results and its symbolic importance. A few even resettled on the island, taking
5
part in colonization schemes similar to those involving Liberia. Haiti and the United
States became inextricably connected as a result of migration; both free blacks looking
for an escape from discrimination in newly independent Haiti, as well as refugees fleeing
the violence of the revolution.
Further, while Haiti is traditionally understood largely for its strategic importance
in the game of nineteenth-century great-power politics, this status takes on a different
meaning for the U.S. when the racial implications of its policies toward Haiti are kept at
the center of the picture. 4 America’s interaction with Haiti, like its unwillingness to do
away with slavery, came to be a factor in unfavorable relations with much of Europe.
The period between 1791 when Haitian slaves rose up against their colonial
overlords and 1863 when the U.S. government finally offered formal diplomatic
recognition to the island nation paid witness to dramatic developments in the American
debate on slavery. The U.S. went from being a country increasingly dependent on slavery
for its economic growth to one free of the malignant institution due to force of arms. By
eschewing the traditional tendency to separate U.S. foreign and domestic policy, a new
interpretation of certain aspects of the American journey out of slavery suggests itself.
Namely, the nature of the conflict between the ideals of the American Revolution and its
slave society in the last decade of the eighteenth century, the evolution of sectionalism in
the U.S., and the symbolic function of Haiti in the minds of Americans, both within and
outside the policy-making sphere, are all factors that demand reevaluation when
4
For the traditional diplomatic history of U.S.-Haitian relations see: Mary Treudley, The Diplomatic
Relations of Santo Domingo with the United States, 1789-1866 (Worcester, Mass., 1916); Charles C.
Tansill, The United States and Santo Domingo, 1798-186: A chapter in Caribbean diplomacy (Gloucester,
Mass., 1938); Ludwell L. Montague, Haiti and the United States, 1714-1938 (Durham, N.C., 1940); and
Rayford W. Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776-1891 (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1941). The latter is, in the opinion of this author, the most complete, and as such is employed for
general diplomatic information more often than the others.
6
employing the Haitian Revolution as a frame of reference for the study of U.S. racial
politics.
It should be emphasized that the methodology employed in this paper more
closely resembles that of policy history or international history, as opposed to that which
largely frames the work of historians of the early Republic. Further, the author’s intent
was primarily to interpret – and in many cases, reinterpret – primary sources culled from
the National Archives, the Papers of William Henry Seward, the South Carolina
Archives, the Pennsylvania Register, and a number of contemporary periodicals, among
others. As such, a survey of some of the most recent literature on U.S. politics in the
early Republic and race in American society is a necessary component to this
introduction and will hopefully remedy any deficiencies as seen by historians of the early
Republic. Without these works this study would not have been possible and their
approaches – if not their specific conclusions – were crucial in framing the arguments
presented herein.
The last few years have been a productive period for the scholarship devoted to
race and slavery in early U.S. society. Matthew Mason’s Slavery and Politics in the Early
American Republic is required reading for any historian attempting to remain up-to-date
on the issues central to the present study. In addition, Adam Rothman’s Slave Country:
American Expansionism and the Origins of the Deep South provides a thoughtful
interpretation of the social and economic factors at work during most of the period
covered within The United States and Haiti, 1791-1863. Two edited works, David
Quigley and David N. Newman’s Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race
and Citizenship, 1777-1877 and Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer’s Prophets
7
of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism provide important
reinterpretations of Northern thought on slavery and abolitionism respectively. 5
The study of the first party system and the concomitant political developments in
the early United States has similarly benefited from a number of uniquely interpretive
studies in recent years. Sean Wilentz’s sprawling book The Rise of American Democracy:
Jefferson to Lincoln serves as an effective representation of the progressive angle to
which most histories of the United States currently subscribe. Similarly, Jeffrey L.
Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson and David Waldstreicher’s Beyond the Founders: New
Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic has collected some
of the more forward-thinking work on early American politics. Two books on the role of
print media – Trish Loughran’s The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S.
Nation Building, 1770-1870 and Jerry W. Knudson’s Jefferson and the Press: Crucible of
Liberty are particularly important in framing this study as it employs such sources
extensively. 6
This thesis follows the labyrinth of U.S. political and social developments through
the advent of the Civil War and, as such, benefited from some modern works on the era
preceding the conflict which resulted in the demise of American slavery. The Urban
South and the Coming of the Civil War by Frank Towers effectively elucidates the
5
Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2006); Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansionism and the Origins of the
Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer,
eds., Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (New York: The New Press,
2006); David Quigley and David N. Gellman, eds., Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race
and Citizenship: 1777-1877 (New York: University Press, 2003).
6
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York and London: W.W.
Norton, 2005); Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the
Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age
of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Jerry W. Knudson,
Jefferson and the Press: Crucible of Liberty (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006).
8
increasingly sectional rift in U.S. society. John Y. Simon, Harold Holzer, and Dawa
Vogel have recently collected some of the most modern interpretations of Abraham
Lincoln, a pivotal figure in American history as well as this thesis, in Lincoln Revisited:
New Insights from the Lincoln Forum. David P. Currie’s The Constitution in Congress”
Descent into Maelstrom, 1829-1861 is crucial to understanding the political and judicial
aspects of the debate over slavery. 7
A few new books examining the era of American slave society from an
international perspective were similarly essential in constructing this paper. Particularly,
Gerald Horne’s The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil and the African Slave
Trade, as well as Ruben Gowricharn’s Caribbean Transnationalism: Migration,
Pluralization, and Social Cohesion have enriched the study of the Atlantic slave trade
and its relationship to U.S. political developments. Europe’s American Revolution by
Simon P. Newman provides a collection of essays that seek to understand the role of the
American Revolution in European society and its subsequent interactions with the United
States. 8
Finally, a clarification regarding terminology is in order due to the various
monikers applied to the western third of what the Spanish called the island of Hispaniola.
During the period of French control, it is most often referred to as Saint Domingue,
though some still referred to it by its Spanish name, Santo Domingo, for many years.
7
Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (Charlottesville and London: University
of Virginia Press, 2004); John Y. Simon, Harold Holzer, and Dawa Vogel, eds., Lincoln Revisited: New
Insights from the Lincoln Forum (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); David P. Currie, The
Constitution in Congress: Descent into Maelstrom, 1829-1861 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005).
8
Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York:
University Press, 2007); Ruben Gowricharn, ed., Caribbean Transnationalism: Migration, Pluralization,
and Social Cohesion (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006); Simon P. Newman, ed., Europe’s American
Revolution (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006).
9
After declaring independence in 1804, the revolutionaries renamed it Haiti, reflecting the
name given it by its native inhabitants. The author attempts herein to use the name most
appropriate depending on the time period in question, though “Haiti” is applied more
universally than any other.
10
CHAPTER 1
In the early days of the colony known by the French as Saint Domingue there was
little indication that, by the late eighteenth century, it would become the wealthiest of the
Caribbean slave colonies. The western third of the island was ceded to Louis XIV in 1697
in the Treaty of Ryswick, ending two centuries of Spanish rule. The first settlers were
mostly former filibustiers, or pirates and freebooters who operated in the surrounding
waters, along with the boucaniers occupied in trapping. What little subsistence farming
the first colonists engaged in gave way to the vastly more lucrative production of tobacco
and indigo in the late seventeenth century, initiating the transition to a plantation
economy supported by forced labor. 9
The first laborers imported to Saint Domingue were actually white indentured
servants or engagés. Soon after the turn of the eighteenth century, however, the colony’s
economy transformed again to focus on the more labor-intensive production of sugar.
This, along with the importation of black slaves resulted in “a tiered system of
interlocking castes and classes all determined by the necessities, structure, and rhythm of
the plantations.” 10 Four primary social castes constituted the population of Saint
Domingue. At the top were the grands blancs, the planters and French-born bureaucrats
with whom rested nearly all of the authority and wealth of the colony. Alongside them
were the lower- and middle-class whites who worked as plantation managers, merchants,
lawyers and tradesmen. Known as petits blancs, many were descendants of the engages,
though their ranks included a number of petty criminals, debtors, and mercenaries who
9
Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1990), 15 and E. Christian de Briffault, “The Haitian Revolution 1791-1803, Race,
Slavery and the Balance of Power: A Comparative Analysis” (Ph. D. diss., St. John’s University, 2004.
10
Franklin W. Knight, “The Haitian Revolution,” The American Historical Review 105 (2000): 107.
11
descended upon Saint Domingue where the privilege of race often provided opportunities
their backgrounds would not have allowed in France. 11
Despite the authorities’ attempts to establish a clear distinction between white and
black, race was not configured in the same way as in the United States. The affranchis, or
free persons of color occupied a middle ground in Saint Domingue’s social system. Most
were of mixed race, and though equal in number to the whites, the affranchis suffered
under a repressive judicial code that enforced their inferior status in relation to the
island’s white population. Nevertheless, through tenacity and thrift, the affranchis were
economically ascendant at the time of the revolution owning fully one-third of the
plantation property, one-quarter of the slaves, and one-quarter of the real estate property
in Saint Domingue. 12 As alarming to the whites as their economic achievements was the
way “these coloreds…imitate the style of the whites and try to wipe out all memory of
their original state.” 13 Most among the affranchis viewed themselves as part of the same
culture as the whites of Saint Domingue and, despite increasingly strict laws meant to
reinforce white hegemony, they continued to model their behavior on that of the grands
and petits blancs often educating themselves and their children in France.
While the official figures cite the 1790 population of Saint Domingue at 30,826
whites, and 24,262 free blacks and mulattoes, the vast bulk of the colony’s inhabitants
were black slaves, said to number over 450,000. 14 It was upon their backs that the great
wealth of the colony and the fortunes of its elite were built. The seemingly endless
11
Fick, 17.
Fick, 19.
13
Cited in de Vaissière, La société, 223.
14
M. L. E. Moreau de St. Mery, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la
partie française de l’isle Saint Domingue (Paris, 1958). See also Jean Price-Mars, “La Position d’Haiti et
de la culture Française en Amérique,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 8 (January 1966): 44-53. PriceMars argues that the official figures were deficient and estimated the slave population to have been about
620,000.
12
12
economic growth and prosperity Saint Domingue underwent in the eighteenth century
depended upon their ceaseless labor. By 1789, roughly two-thirds of these slaves were
African-born: men and women forced to leave their homelands, crammed onto slave
ships, and sold in the Americas in order to fill a constantly expanding demand for labor.
Averaging some 14,500 captives per year between 1700 and 1792, the actual number of
slaves imported increased dramatically in the last years of the colonial regime reaching
37,000 slaves per year between 1783 and 1792. 15 Ironically, the wealth produced by
Saint Dominguan slave labor fueled, in no small part, the rise of the French bourgeoisie
and consequently, the French Revolution, without which the Haitian slave insurrection
may not have occurred.
Despite concerted efforts to maintain white solidarity, including the 1763
legislation forbidding any of the affranchis from holding public office, practicing law or
medicine, and engaging in other privileged trades, the whites of Saint Domingue were
almost always in conflict. The petits blancs, perhaps the group with the most to lose and,
as such, often the most politically volatile, resented the arrogance and privilege of the
grands blancs as well as the economic achievements of the affranchis who not only
competed with the lower- and middle-class whites but often surpassed them in wealth. It
was not uncommon for even the grands blancs to divide between the ruling bureaucrats
and the planters. At such times, the planter class would often elicit support from among
both the petits blancs and the affranchis. Beneath the powder keg of these factional
conflicts laid the mass of black slaves who were anything but blind to the potential
vulnerability of Saint Domingue’s precarious slave society.
15
Fick, 22.
13
The calling of the Estates General to Versailles in the fateful year of 1789
precipitated not only the French Revolution but also the events which would trigger the
Haitian slave revolt. Inspired by events in Paris, the petits blancs-controlled Colonial
Assembly of St. Marc in west Saint Domingue issued a constitution for the entire colony.
Angered by this affront to their presumed superiority, the grands blancs of the north
attempted a coup. Both sectors of the white population began preparations for war,
arming their slaves for the fight to come. When, however, the National Assembly passed
the May Decree enfranchising propertied affranchis, they temporarily shelved their class
differences and forged an alliance in order to stave off the threat of racial equality. The
free blacks, determined to stand up for their hard fought political rights, in turn, armed
their slaves for the impending racial war. 16
Employed for two years fighting for one of the other three factions in the colony,
the slaves of Saint Domingue knew that if the whites and free blacks could employ
violence in the name of liberty, so too could they go to war on their own behalf. In fact,
the maroon bands of escaped slaves that had roved the mountainous interior of the island
had, for years, engaged in guerilla tactics against the plantations of Saint Domingue,
establishing a tradition of resistance to slavery. Finally, on the night of August 22, 1791,
the slaves of the Plain du Nord, taking advantage of the instability resulting from the
conflagration between the other classes, began a full-scale insurrection. Hundreds of
thousands of slaves set fire to plantations, torched cities, and began slaughtering their
former masters. So began the most successful slave revolt in history which, in 1804,
resulted in an independent Haiti, eventually spelling an end to all Caribbean slavery. The
16
Knight, 111.
14
repercussions of the Haitian Revolution would be felt for generations, and nowhere more
than in its slaveholding neighbor to the north, the United States.
***
On the eve of the Saint Dominguan slave revolt, the French colony consumed
between 10 and 15 percent of all American exports, more than the rest of the West Indies
combined. The U.S. provided its plantations with everything from foodstuffs like beef,
pork and fish to lumber and slaves. In return, the colony provided the United States with
nearly all of the sugar and molasses it imported, which, distilled into rum, became an
important staple in Atlantic commerce. Despite restrictive British and French navigation
laws, some 500 American ships were actively trading with Saint Domingue which was
second only to Great Britain in the young nation’s foreign commerce. 17 John Adams,
then U.S. minister to England, spoke not only for the leading statesmen of the fledgling
nation, but also for widespread public opinion when he stated that “the commerce of the
West India islands is part of the American system of commerce. They can neither do
without us, nor we without them.” 18
As lucrative and vital as the trade between the two nations was, however, the
connection between the United States and Saint Domingue went much deeper. The
political agenda of the colony’s free blacks was informed in so small part by the
American Revolution. A regiment of affranchis known as the Fontages Legion, had
traveled to Georgia where it participated in the siege of Savannah against the British
redcoats. Performing admirably in battle, particularly in the failed assault of October 9,
17
Rayford W. Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776-1891 (Chapel Hill:
1941), 6-7; Ludwell L. Montague, Haiti and the United States, 1714-1938 (Durham, Duke University
Press: 1940), 32; Matthewson, Proslavery, 9-10.
18
John Adams to Robert Livingston, Paris, 23 June 1783, in The Works of John Adams, Charles F. Adams,
ed., (10 vols., Boston 1853-56), 8: 74.
15
1779, the regiment included in its ranks many future leaders of the Haitian Revolution,
among them Jean Baptiste Chavannes, André Rigaud, Jean-Pierre Lambert, and Henry
Christophe. They returned home with both military experience and the ideology of liberty
espoused by American patriots, both of which would figure prominently in subsequent
events.
Of equal importance was the news, brought to the slaves of Saint Domingue by
African American sailors on American ships, that slaves in the Northern states had gained
their freedom. These landmark changes in North America were compounded by the
formation in 1788 of the Amis de noirs, a French antislavery society which petitioned the
French crown for humane treatment of slaves and flooded the island with abolitionist
propaganda. In one of the only first-hand accounts of the early days of the slave revolt, a
disaffected young planter asked how the colony’s slaves, “so well treated,” could rebel
and placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of French abolitionists who he conflated
with Revolutionaries. “One must ask those composers of phrases who have inundated the
country with their incendiary writings; those stupid innovators who brought turmoil to
France and killed their King; those Whites of Europe who were found at the head of the
insurgents.” 19 This sentiment would later become an important part of master-class
ideology in the American South as well. The powerful British antislavery movement
gained steam around the same time when, in 1789, William Wilberforce demanded an
end to England’s participation in the slave trade, an extremely disturbing development for
Jamaican planters who insisted abolitionists were intentionally fomenting rebellion.
19
Althéa de Puech Parham, ed., My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from Two Revolutions
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959), 44.
16
Antislavery sentiment existed at the time of the Haitian Revolution, not only
across the Atlantic, but in North America as well. What had been a white consensus on
the question of slavery before 1750 began to show signs of dissent in the four decades
before the revolt in Saint Domingue. Cracks appeared in white solidarity such that, before
1791, “there was a remarkable convergence of cultural and intellectual developments
which at once undercut traditional rationalizations for slavery and offered new modes of
sensibility for identifying with its victims.” 20 While nowhere near as developed as
European abolitionism, American minds were not insulated from the factors – the
emergence of secular social philosophy, British industrialization, and religious moralism
– that provided much of the basis for rejecting traditional defenses of slavery. 21
Into this situation arrived the news of the bloody revolt in Saint Domingue. The
island’s colonial assembly immediately requested assistance from its neighbors, acquiring
aid from Martinique, and even Jamaica where British planters put aside nationalistic
grudges and opted to stand in solidarity with their fellow slaveholders. The colonial
assembly, however, looked most expectantly to the United States where its agents
circumvented diplomatic protocol, much to the dismay of Paris’s foreign minister in
Philadelphia.
Apparently well aware of the potential for empathy from a state where slaves
constituted a majority of the population, Monsieur Polony, charged with securing foreign
aid, sent an urgent and frightful message to South Carolina’s governor. “The French of
St. Domingo find themselves in the most imminent danger,” read the proceedings –
20
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolutions, reprinted in The Antislavery
Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, UCLA Press:
1992), 25.
21
Davis, Problem of Slavery, 22-27.
17
included with Polony’s request – of the General Assembly of Saint Domingue of 24th
August, holed up in Cape Francois. “The slaves have risen, the houses are on fire. The
whites who had the government of them are murdered. Those who have escaped the
sword of the assassins are obliged to retreat into their towns and abandon their
properties.” The communication reflected the desperation of the colony’s elites just two
days into a conflagration that would ravage the island for thirteen years. It also sought to
play on the fears of South Carolinians who already viewed with trepidation the potential
consequences of a slave revolt at home. “The scourge which is now laying waste the most
valuable French possessions in America,” stated the communiqué, “threatens all the
neighboring Colonies if they do not invite to destroy the source of it.” 22
Unfortunately for Monsieur Polony and the whites of Saint Domingue, the South
Carolina legislature was in recess until early December. In responding to Polony’s urgent
appeal for assistance in combating the August revolt, however, Governor Charles
Pinckney stated that South Carolina’s citizens “feel for your situation” and “have a
particular interest in hoping that such support will be afforded by your friends as will
enable you to effectively crush so daring & unprovoked a rebellion.” Your success, he
continued, “will prove the general detestation in which such attempts are held and will
always be opposed [;]…your future and the fate of the insurgents will have a happy effect
in operating as an example to prevent similar commotions in other countries.” 23 For
reasons he would only relate to his own legislature, however, the Governor at first offered
only the rhetoric of solidarity in place of concrete assistance.
22
“Extract from the register of the General Assembly of St. Domingo, August 24th 1791,” in messages
received: Enclosures, Governor’s messages, transmitted to House 5th December 1791, transmitted to Senate
6th December 1791, South Carolina Archives, Columbia (microfilm).
23
Governor Charles Pinckney’s answer to the Colonial Assembly of St. Domingo, September 1791 in
Messages received: Enclosures, South Carolina Archives, Columbia (microfilm).
18
Upon the South Carolina legislature’s return in early December, Governor
Pinckney sent the House and Senate copies of is correspondence with the French
colony’s agent, including the original request and his response. He also included a
message to the assembly stating that “their communications are of an affecting nature
being a country of similar possessions,” referring to his state’s reliance on its own slaves
and plantations. He went on to say that “while we may sympathize with our friends and
lament their sufferings, they very strongly prove the policy of having our Malitia [sic]
always in a situation to act with promptness and effect as circumstances may require.”
The Governor also makes reference to “the difference of opinions which prevail…upon
the regulation of the Militia,” suggesting that at least some representatives may have
intended for the South Carolina militia to engage directly in the revolt in Saint
Domingue. 24 Pinckney instead admonished the assembly to provide monetary assistance
to the beleaguered French planters and keep the troops at home.
Unsatisfied with the Governor’s response, Monsieur Polony attempted to appeal
directly to the South Carolina General Assembly, a move that would not have been
possible save for the newness of the U.S. federal government. As he put it,
“notwithstanding the answer which his Excellency [the Governor] politely communicated
to me,” he was left “but little expectation of succeeding in proportion to the hopes and
necessities of my country.” Polony, committed to his relief mission, employed both
flattery as well as an appeal for empathy, writing: “Friends and allies! of a free people;
whose courage and whose humanity have been distinguished under all circumstances, and
have called forth the admiration of the whole European world….You [who share] as well
24
Governor Charles Pinckney to the South Carolina House and Senate, 4th December 1791 in Messages
received: Enclosures, South Carolina Archives, Columbia (microfilm).
19
a peculiar sympathy of circumstances….Who better than you can feel and appreciate
misery which language is so little able to describe[?]” 25
Ultimately, the South Carolina legislature took the advice of its governor and kept
its militia at home. Instead, they offered “to furnish such supplies of provisions or stores
as Monsieur Polloney [sic] shall think fit to order for the French portion of the Island of
Saint Domingo to the amount of a sum not exceeding three thousand pounds.” 26 The
supplies were a small contribution in the face of “an event to which the history of
America affords no comparisons of history.” 27 The Governor did not even bother to alert
the legislature until they were back in session, two months after first hearing of the revolt.
Perhaps Governor Pinckney and his legislature failed to realize the gravity of the
situation, though this seems highly unlikely. Considering their self-acknowledged
vulnerability at home, it is much more probable that, while desiring to do anything in
their power to check the rebellion, they feared exerting themselves too greatly lest they
find themselves in a similar predicament. In fact, Pinckney wrote to President George
Washington long before alerting the South Carolina General Assembly, urging him to
take action or risk the revolt becoming a “flame which will extend to the neighboring
islands, and may eventually prove not a very pleasing or agreeable example to the
Southern States.” 28
Saint Domingue’s colonial assembly did not, however, pin all of its hopes on
South Carolina. In an effort to gain more from his mission to the Southern state,
25
M. Polony, petition to South Carolina legislature, December 1791, South Carolina Archives, Columbia
(microfilm).
26
General Assembly Committee Report and Resolution regarding Governor’s Message and enclosed
memorial from M. Poloney, 15th December 1791, South Carolina Archives, Columbia (microfilm).
27
M. Polony, petition to South Carolina legislature, December 1791, South Carolina Archives, Columbia
(microfilm).
28
Pinckney to Washington, Charleston, 20th September 1791.
20
Monsieur Poloney mentions his colleague Monsieur Roustan who was dispatched to
Philadelphia in an attempt to gain the support of the U.S. Congress and, while there,
gained the attention of the Pennsylvania legislature. He admonishes his South Carolinian
audience to emulate the Pennsylvanians who, “deeply affected by the scenes of distress
presented…generously decreed to us all the assistance they had it in their power to
bestow.” Though an exaggeration, the mission to Philadelphia did obtain a much more
prompt response. The debate it engendered in the Pennsylvania statehouse, however, had
little in common with the white solidarity characteristic of South Carolina’s reaction.
It is unclear how the Pennsylvania legislature became informed of the slave revolt
on Saint Domingue or why they, without outside urging, took such direct interest in the
matter. They had already drafted two resolutions regarding assistance to the French
colony and formed a committee to investigate the truth of the reports of insurrection
when they learned – following the investigations of the aforementioned committee – of
the presence in Philadelphia of Roustan. One thing that is clear, however, is that his
mission aroused the suspicions of the French minister Jean Baptiste de Ternant.
Ternant, alerted to the presence of Roustan by the Consular General who
encountered the Dominguan diplomat in New York, was at once alarmed at his
pretensions to “negotiating with the United States as Sovereign Nation to Sovereign
Nation.” 29 Although concerned that any weapons procured might eventually be turned
against the Mother Country, Ternant nonetheless felt compelled to provide the assistance
the colony needed lest it take a step toward independence by subverting diplomatic
protocol and acquiring aid directly from the United States. Ternant noted with
29
Ternant to Montmorin, 28th September 1791, Frederick Jackson Turner, ed., in Correspondence of the
French Foreign Ministers (henceforth denoted as CFM), 47.
21
consternation how Roustan could hardly have failed in this regard as, only a day after his
arrival in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives submitted two
proposals for the island’s relief.
The political environment in Pennsylvania regarding matters of race and slavery
bore little resemblance to that in South Carolina. Whereas such matters were treated with
a certain casual racism as well as a near-universal fear of slave revolt in the former state,
Pennsylvania’s state house seemed to handle them much more delicately. Just days after
the insurrection on Saint Domingue and before news of it had reached Pennsylvania, its
legislature was hearing the complaints of one of its members who possessed evidence
that a free black was kidnapped in the state to be sold in a Virginia slave market. Urged
on “by the Society for the gradual abolition of slavery, to make a demand that they [the
kidnappers] should be delivered up, to answer the charges against them,” the
representative contacted the governor of Virginia where he was rebuffed. 30 The state’s
subsequent willingness to engage in a limited legal altercation with its neighbor over the
issue points toward the very different atmosphere in Pennsylvania versus that in South
Carolina.
Thus, the outbreak of rebellion in Saint Domingue produced a complex response
from the Pennsylvania legislature. On September, 21, Representative Richard Wells
offered two resolutions in support of the colonists of Saint Domingue. It noted the “cruel
and barbarous massacre of the white inhabitants,” and the feelings of “deep sympathy for
the distressed and dreadful situation of the wretched inhabitants of Cape-Francois, then
closely besieged by an enraged and brutal multitude of Negroes and Mulattoes.” Wells’
proposal, seconded by Francis Gurney, went far beyond words of solidarity, however,
30
Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Journal (Philadelphia, 1791), 445.
22
and offered to immediately provide resources to “succour the unhappy inhabitants of
Cape Francois,” threatened as they were “by a murdering and desperate host of Negroes
and Mulattoes.” The resolution further called for the establishment of a committee to
draft a bill to enable the governor to charter two ships for the purpose of transporting
supplies to the Saint Dominguan planters, as well as to take on board as many refugees as
possible. 31
The committee, which consisted of Richard Wells, Elias Boys, Daniel Clymer,
Albert Gallatin, and Cadwallader Evans, reported back the following day. Having
discovered the presence of Monsieur Roustan, they were informed that the mulattoes of
Saint Domingue had not taken part in the violent revolt – “on the contrary, great numbers
of those people have tendered their services to defend the city, and have been armed for
that purpose.” A motion was thus made by Richard Wells to strike out the words, “and
Mulattoes,” which passed. The records of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives
next mention that Samuel MacClay offered another amendment, this time suggesting that
the words, “by a murdering and desperate host of Negroes,” be eliminated from the
resolution. 32 It seems, however surprisingly, that this only came after a brisk debate
concerning the possible legitimacy of the slaves’ cause. A representative identified only
as a Quaker, rose during the deliberations to state “that it would be inconsistent on the
part of a free State to take measures against a people who used the only means they had
of throwing off the yoke of terrible slavery; that if the Negro insurrection were treated as
31
32
Pennsylvania House of Reps., Journal (Philadelphia, 1791), 528.
Pennsylvania House of Reps., Journal (Philadelphia, 1791), 530.
23
a rebellion, what name could then be given to that of the Americans, through which they
won their independence?” 33
He was not the only member offended by the wording of the resolution. Albert
Gallatin, a member of the committee charged with preparing the bill to provide the
vessels for Saint Domingue’s relief and the future Jeffersonian Republican leader,
expressed similar sentiments in his personal correspondence. Though he regretted the
violence of the rebellion, it was clear to Gallatin that the brutality of the blacks was the
direct consequence of so many years of slavery. “For the whites to expect mercy from the
mulattoes and negroes is absurd,” he wrote, “and whilst we pity the misfortunes of the
present generation of whites of that island, in which, many innocent victims have been
involved, can we help acknowledge that calamity to be the just punishment for the crimes
of so many generations of slave-traders and slave-holders?” 34
To what extent Gallatin or others participated in the debate is unclear, however,
there were enough abolitionist voices to change the wording of the resolution to exclude
the words, “by a murdering and desperate host of Negroes.” Samuel MacClay’s
compromise passed, 36 to 24, on a roll-call vote. Among its supporters were Gallatin and
Richard Wells, who was originally so militant in the language of his own resolutions. His
usual supporter, Francis Gurney, however, took the other side, along with Boys and
Evans, other members of the committee. 35
33
Quoted in Ternant to Montmorin , Philadelphia, 30th September 1791, Turner, ed., CFM, 53. Tim
Matthewson, in the footnotes of A Proslavery Foreign Policy, 34, notes that “Quaker” was often used to
denote an antislavery advocate, regardless of religious persuasion.
34
Gallatin to Jean Badollet, Philadelpia, 1st February 1794, Henry Adams, ed., The Writings of Albert
Gallatin, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1879), 2: 109-110.
35
Pennsylvania House of Reps., Journal (Philadelphia, 1791), 531.
24
In the end, the resolution was not acted upon as it came to the attention of the
Pennsylvania legislature that measures had been taken by the office of the French foreign
ministry to provide for the needs of the inhabitants of Saint Domingue. Minister Ternant,
greatly perturbed by what he viewed as the arrogance of Roustan, who had publicly taken
the title of “Deputy of the Colony of St. Domingue to the United States,” went directly to
the U.S. government for aid and sent Roustan packing for Paris. 36 Moreover,
Pennsylvania’s assistance was ultimately unnecessary in light of the federal government’s
receptiveness to Ternant’s requests.
The French foreign minister first contacted the Secretary of the Treasury,
Alexander Hamilton, and the Secretary of War, Henry Knox. Both reacted positively:
Hamilton offered up $40,000 of the money owed France for its assistance in the
Revolutionary War and Knox quickly sold Ternant a thousand muskets from the arsenal
at West Point. President Washington was soon consulted but there appears never to have
been much question as to which side to take in the struggle. The planter hegemony had to
be maintained. Only Washington, though, mentioned race in his rationale for supporting
the colonists. “Lamentable…to see such a spirit of revolt among the blacks,” he
remarked. 37 The others saw the maintenance of commerce and the ability to prove to
France the new nation’s willingness to repay the debt owed its recent ally as sufficient
reasons to intervene.
Few observers thought the slave revolt on Saint Domingue would turn out any
different than nearly all others before it. No one realized that in the years to come, the
rebellion would become a full-scale revolution, upending the society and economy of the
36
Ternant to Montmorin, 28th September 1791, Turner, ed., CFM, 50.
Washington to John Vaughn, 27th December 1791, The Writings of George Washington, ed., John C.
Fitzpatrick, 39 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1931-44), 31: 453.
37
25
island and resulting in the first black republic. George Washington, though not alone in
his deep concern as to the plight of the planters, was certainly in the minority when he
expressed to Ternant an uncertainty as to the final outcome. “Whatever the final issue of
this affair may be it is difficult at this distance…to foretell, but certain it is, the
commencement has been both daring and alarming. Let us, however, hope for the best.” 38
Not even Washington had any idea how complex the situation in Saint Domingue was
about to make international relations, particularly those between the United States and its
European rivals.
Still, the opening acts of this drama allow a rare glimpse into the formation of a
foreign policy so intrinsically attached to domestic anxieties and sentiments. The
fledgling federal government of the United States, still gaining its bearings after the
tumultuous days of its resistance to British rule, was at first circumvented by a Saint
Dominguan colonial assembly desperate for salvation and willing to appeal directly to
state legislatures. As a result, relatively localized attitudes on slavery and race were
visible as state policy makers in South Carolina and Pennsylvania briefly became actors
in foreign affairs. The reaction of the South Carolinians largely reflected their racism and
fear of a revolt at home. This anxiety would continue to motivate their actions in regard
to Haitian-American relations until the Civil War put an end to the cruel institution they
were defending, though this fear, as will later be demonstrated, did not always translate
directly into anti-Haitian policies. While such sentiment similarly dominated the federal
government’s deliberations concerning the island nation for years, the issue would
38
Washington to Ternant, Mount Vernon, 2nd October 1791, The Writings of George Washington, Jared
Sparks, ed. 12 vols. (Boston, 1834-1837), 10: 195.
26
continue to be a battle ground upon which both supporters and detractors of slavery
would take a stand.
Despite the lack of a coherent antislavery agenda in North America in 1791, this
process took an important step the moment Americans learned of the revolt on Saint
Domingue. Americans in public life, such as those in the Pennsylvania and South
Carolina legislatures, were forced to make their positions known on a matter of race.
Anti-slavery sympathizers in the Pennsylvania legislature, some of whom had acted
against slavery in their own state, were in large part similarly guided on this foreign
policy issue. Even so, their interaction with their slaveholding “sister states” was too
often “calculated to avoid all invidious and unprofitable altercation.” 39 This state of
affairs was not to last, however, and as tension between North and South increased in
subsequent decades, so too did pressure to reform relations with Haiti cause the issue to
become increasingly contentious.
Most importantly, however, the actions of the Pennsylvania and South Carolina
legislatures in the days immediately following the slave revolt on Saint Domingue
indicate the way American policymakers’ attitudes on matters of race extended into the
arena of foreign policy. As a result, the divisions within American society come into
sharper relief, presaging the terminal crisis of American slavery. The actions of South
Carolina’s general assembly, which did not even begin to question the legitimacy of the
planter regime in Saint Domingue, contrast sharply with Albert Gallatin’s suggestion that
the island’s planters got what was coming to them for perpetuating an evil institution.
The Pennsylvania legislature’s debate on whether or not to call the insurgents “a
39
Pennsylvania House of Reps., Journal (Philadelphia, 1791), 445. The quote is in regard to the complaint
concerning the kidnapping of the free black by Virginians mentioned on page 14.
27
murdering and desperate host of Negroes,” had no bearing on the action to be taken as the
body’s membership had agreed to provide the colony’s white population with assistance.
At least thirty-six of the Pennsylvania House’s members, however, apparently did not
want their name identified with a resolution defaming the black rebels. While this act
may not register high on the continuum of abolitionist sentiment, it is not without
significance. By taking action on a matter of foreign policy, members of the legislatures
of Pennsylvania and South Carolina, as well as members of the federal government,
expressed their attitudes on slavery at home. It would not be the last time this occurred.
28
CHAPTER 2
As news of the slave revolt on St. Domingue spread in the United States and
public opinion began to take shape, a number of factors, both geopolitical and domestic
in nature, influenced the ensuing debate over how to respond to this unprecedented event.
Growing hostility between the United States and France, the needs of the young nation’s
economy and its merchant class, as well as the complexity of views on matters of race so
aptly personified by Thomas Jefferson all played a role in the formation of a foreign
policy toward Haiti. None, however, turned out to be as instrumental as the ambition and
paranoia of the southern planter class which, abandoning the post-Revolutionary
apologies for slavery, embarked on a program of expansionism both territorial and
ideological in nature. Indeed, one historian has labeled Jefferson’s impact on HaitianAmerican relations “the triumph of the southern conservative reaction” to the Haitian
Revolution. 40
While southern slave-owners did exert disproportionate influence over U.S.
foreign policy, their reaction to the Haitian Revolution, more than simple repugnance
toward black independence and naked fear of slave revolt at home, was also indicative of
the social and political climate in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Though the
idea of a multi-racial society remained anathema to all but a handful of radicals at this
time, a degree of ambiguity as to the future of American slavery resulted in an exchange
of views on Haiti that differed from the expectant conservative reaction that would later
become the over-riding factor in determining U.S. foreign policy regarding Haiti. The
uncharacteristic and surprising embrace of the Revolution’s most charismatic leader,
40
Tim Matthewson, “Jefferson and the Nonrecognition of Haiti,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 140 (1996): 23.
29
Toussaint Louverture, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, played an important role in
this episode in America’s agonizing journey out of slavery and indicated that there was
more to the Southern calculus than a simplistic racism or even a desire to preserve their
human property.
In the years immediately following the American Revolution, the conflict
between proponents and detractors of slavery began to take shape in the United States as
well as across the Atlantic. While this complex clash took many forms and a simple
dichotomy between pro- and anti-slavery forces obscures the divisions and alliances that
formed across and within sectional, political and class-based lines, as well as the varying
meanings of the related terminology, this study leaves much of this subtle differentiation
to others. Instead, it is more important here to focus on the increasingly sectional conflict
arising in the United States between regions in which slavery remained an integral part of
the local economy and those in which it was gradually phased out in the wake of the
Revolution. As one historian aptly notes, “The Revolution had entailed upon the
institution of slavery a gigantic question mark and upon Americans the necessity of
facing up to the prospect of what it would be like actually to have Negroes free.” 41 The
answer, formed in the minds of Americans, to this implicit question was influenced by a
wide range of factors, not least among them perceptions of events in the Caribbean.
Just as Enlightenment principles provided so much of the basis for the political
revolutions of the time, so too did they contribute to the development of complex and
interrelated phenomena in Western culture, particularly British Protestantism, that
provided the intellectual framework necessary to question the legitimacy of slavery.
41
Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812. (New York:
Norton, 1968).
30
Among them were the emergence of a secular social philosophy and the popularization of
an ethic of benevolence, two developments which raised question sabout slavery’s
morality in Western societies. Similarly, changing perceptions of the cultural difference
of blacks, an image made more positive by primitivists seeking to prove man’s inherent
virtue and creativity by constructing the “noble savage,” played an important role in
beginning the process of deconstructing some of the most negative stereotypes relating to
blacks. 42 Of course, these transformations alone do not account for the appearance of
organized efforts to limit or end slavery as the secular Enlightenment also contained ideas
and perceptions which tended to encourage the defense of slavery. Precise causality,
however, is less important to this study as is the fact that conditions existed which made
slavery a vulnerable institution; which made it easier to perceive its inherent
contradictions; and relaxed the sense of inevitability which had heretofore been
associated with it.
At the same time material circumstances and trends seemed to bear out the hopes
of abolitionists. While the period preceding the American Revolution was a veritable
golden age for Caribbean sugar cultivators and, to a lesser extent, those producing other
crops on the backs of imported slaves, the war exposed the vulnerabilities of this key part
of the Atlantic trade system. By curtailing the flow of provisions from North America,
the conflict resulted in higher production costs and inflation. Further, hostilities
threatened many colonies with destruction at the hands of foreign armies and if that were
not enough, a series of hurricanes devastated Jamaica and the Leeward Islands. Long the
core of the trans-Atlantic slave system, any weakening of the Caribbean sugar plantations
42
See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution: 1770-1823. (Cornell University
Press: Ithaca, 1975), 45-48. Davis provides a detailed description of the factors influencing the rise of
antislavery sentiment and deconstructs the complexity of the conflict between pro- and anti-slavery forces.
31
and the class which was dependent on their success for wealth was perceived by
abolitionists as an indication of slavery’s overall decline. 43 This period also witnessed the
rise of abolitionist organizations when, in 1787, the Committee for the Abolition of the
Slave Trade was founded in Britain followed closely by the Société des Amis des Noirs in
France. The first American abolitionist organization, the Society for the Relief of Free
Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, was established in 1775. It was soon followed by
The Society of Friends, the Pennsylvania Antislavery Society, and the New York
Manumission Society.
While many attempted to insulate blacks from the swirl of ideas influencing the
beginnings of abolitionism, such efforts were in vain. Unwilling to wait for a gradual
emancipation which might never come, many sought more forcefully than ever to secure
their own freedom. Such sentiment fueled the insurrection in Haiti as well as subsequent
plots in North America. The concomitant violence – or threat of violence – in turn
resulted in the Southern conservative reaction against the liberalizing trends of the
revolutionary age. This response found its culmination in the embargo and nonrecognition of Haiti secured in 1806 by the United States Congress over the objections,
muted though they may have been, of northern merchants and antislavery sympathizers.
A detailed analysis of the years immediately preceding the embargo, however,
reveal the complex and countervailing forces at work as well as a certain willingness on
the part of the Southern slaveholding establishment to compromise one the core
underpinnings of Southern slave society – that is, the myth of black inferiority – by
embracing Toussaint Louverture. This circumstance existed for only a few years,
however, diminishing in the wake of Louverture’s arrest by the French, the ensuing
43
Davis, 51-53.
32
violence in Haiti, and its perceived spread to the American South. This violence, along
with the arrival of thousands of French refugees and the efforts of some Southern
political philosophers, armed planters with the ideological weaponry needed to resist
efforts toward emancipation. Their success in papering over the inherent contradictions of
slavery would, however, only temporarily insulate the institution.
***
Official federal aid to the beleaguered colony ended abruptly in 1793 when the
planter regime collapsed and black rebels seized control of most of St. Domingue. The
end of white hegemony in the former French colony did not, however, bring an end to the
profits of American merchants. Instead of trading with the French, U.S. businessmen
simply made their contracts with the British, who occupied various parts of the island
between 1793 and 1798, and with the black rebels and their mulatto allies. Hence,
American exports to the island grew from $3,200,000 in 1790 to $8,400,000 by 1796. 44
As relations with the French deteriorated following the signing of the Jay Treaty with
England in 1794, most Federalists viewed St. Dominguan independence as both an
opportunity for commercial profits and as a means of hindering French power in the
Western hemisphere. 45 The focal point of Federalist confidence in the ability to achieve
political and economic gain from the Haitian Revolution was the latest and most
charismatic leader of the continuing revolt, Toussaint Louverture.
Succeeding Léger Félicité Sonthonax, the white radical commissioner from
France, Toussaint Louverture immediately set about implementing his vision for the
44
Logan, 60; Montague, 47.
President John Adams disagreed with this assessment at first but was eventually convinced of its merits.
See Adams to Timothy Pickering, Apr. 17, 1799, in Charles F. Adams, ed., “The Works of John Adams”
(10 vols., Boston 1850-1856), 8, 634.
45
33
future of Saint Domingue. An extraordinarily complex personality, described variously as
an autocrat, aristocrat, tireless worker, mystic, and humanitarian, Toussaint often imitated
Napoleon Bonaparte in dress and demeanor. One of the earliest American consuls to the
island, Tobias Lear observed the adoration of Toussaint “by all the inhabitants of all
colours; whether this proceeds from fear or love I cannot tell; but all speak of him as a
just man.” 46 It was perhaps this perception that allowed Toussaint so much success in
forcing the black revolutionaries to return to work on the abandoned plantations spread
throughout the country. As a result, he garnered praise and support from both his own
people as well as many in the United States. 47
Hoping to formalize U.S.-Haitian trade, Toussaint sent Joseph Bunel as his
representative to Philadelphia in mid-1798. Many important federalists were highly
receptive to Bunel’s offer of an alliance which would allow the United States exclusive
rights in the traffic of supplies necessary for carrying out St. Domingue’s ongoing
struggle against France. 48 Foremost among such federalist supporters was Timothy
Pickering, secretary of state from 1795 to 1800, who firmly believed Toussaint
Louverture to be “a prudent and judicious man possessing the general confidence of the
people of all colors.” 49 An early advocate of Haitian independence, he further wrote that
“nothing is more clear than, if left to themselves, that the blacks of St. Domingo will be
incomparably less dangerous than if they remain the subjects of France…France with an
army of those black troops might conquer all the British Isles [in the Caribbean] and put
46
Lear to Madison, July 20, 1801, Consular Dispatches, Cap-Haitien, vol. 3.
The majority of my assessment of Touissant Louverture is informed by Thomas O. Ott, The Haitian
Revolution. (Knoville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), 127-135.
48
Charleston City Gazette, June 3, 1799.
49
Pickering to William Smith, Feb. 13, 1799, Pickering Papers, reel 10 (Massachusetts Historical Society).
47
34
in jeopardy our Southern States.” 50 According to Pickering, southern Federalists in
Congress agreed about the danger posed by France. “The Southern Members were
convinced, and therefore cordially concurred in the policy of the Independence of St. D.,
if T[oussain]t and his followers will it. Mr. [Jacob] Read [of South Carolina] was the only
exception to this opinion, and his opinions are sometimes unaccountable.”51
The issue split Americans along party lines as Federalists, both North and South
alike, viewed Haitian independence favorably while Jeffersonian Republicans opposed it.
For Federalists, the fear of French power in the Caribbean and their desire to expand U.S.
trade in the region motivated their support for Toussaint Louverture and the rebellion he
led. At the same time Republicans faced a dilemma: their pro-French and anti-black
attitudes were in conflict with the commercial and security interests of the United States,
especially with the outbreak of the Quasi-War with France in 1798. As a result, Thomas
Jefferson did little to hinder American merchants supplying the rebels until after the fate
of St. Domingue had been decided. 52
For Napoleon, controlling St. Domingue was crucial to gaining any real benefit
from Louisiana and ultimately, consolidating French possessions in the West Indies. At
the same time, Americans gazed covetously upon Louisiana and the potential for
economic expansion it offered through the application and expansion of slave-based
agricultural practices. Thus, Jefferson and other Republicans found themselves in the
50
Pickering to Smith, May 5, 1799, Pickering Papers, reel 11.
Charles R. King, ed., “Life and Correspondence of Rufus King” (6 vols., New York: 1894-1900), 2, 557558.
52
Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean. (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1988), 84-85; Donald R. Hickey, “America’s Response to the Slave
Revolt in Haiti, 1791-1806,” Journal of the Early Republic 2 (1982): 366-68.
51
35
awkward position of relying on a charismatic former slave in revolt against France to
secure U.S. interests in both the Mississippi Valley and the Caribbean.
The fact that Toussaint, by keeping the French government busy in St. Domingue,
had freed Louisiana for American expansion to the southwest, was not lost on the editors
of Southern newspapers. Rather than indulge in racism or misdirection, they embraced
the black rebel with all possible sincerity and as much propriety as he was accorded in
Northern newspapers. In spite of his color, one newspaper acknowledged that Toussaint
“must be a man of no inconsiderable talent, since he has both conceived and executed so
great a project as that of rescuing his unhappy country from the miseries with which it
was afflicted by the tyranny of France.” 53
After General Leclerc of the French expeditionary force treacherously took
Toussaint Louverture into custody in June 1802, Southern editors continued to extol his
virtues. In an essay strongly supporting the deposed general one editor wrote that “in
every point of view Toussaint is an interesting character. To those who consider him an
advocate of an oppressed people, his discomfiture will be a source of regret….Even as
the leader of a revolt, his conduct as far as has been correctly developed, evidences
powers of mind, which in higher stations would exhort admiration.” 54 In an attempt to
ameliorate American anger over Toussaint’s fate and as a result of the surprising amount
of support he enjoyed in the United States, French authorities published an official
explanation of the black general’s arrest in U.S. papers accusing him of complicity in the
massacre of whites and of plotting independence from France. It would seem, however,
that anti-French sentiment weighed more heavily in the South than did anti-black
53
54
Columbia Mirror and Alexandria Gazette (Va.), May 25, 1799.
Advertiser and Commercial Intelligencer, Alexandria, (Va.), June 28, 1802.
36
attitudes as Southern whites seemed uncommonly willing to grant Toussaint Louverture
the benefit of the doubt. Wrote another Southern newspaper editor in response to the
French explanation, “Toussaint, before the arrival of the French army could not by the
most rancorous of his enemies, be accused with having spilt the blood of the innocent; he
could not be reproached with requisitions and robberies, such as have marked the
progress of General Leclerc. We have been told that he was a monster, and that he has
committed the most wanton cruelties, but where are the proofs of this?” 55
If his demise the next year in a French prison were not enough to bolster antiFrench sentiment, several papers editorialized about the indignities perpetrated upon
Toussaint’s family. In a front-page article, The Richmond Enquirer castigated the French
for their treatment of Madame Toussaint, the general’s wife. Though not actually
pregnant at the time, the article suggests that she lost a child due to torture and reported
that she “has no less than 44 wounds in different parts of her body. Pieces of flesh have
been torn from her breast, as with hot irons, together with nails of her toes!” The editor
sarcastically held Madame Toussaint up as “a living witness to the humanity and honor of
the tender Emperor of the French.” 56
It was certainly in the interests of Americans, both pro- and anti-slavery, to
abandon their racial stereotypes by embracing Toussaint Louverture. Federalists, hoping
to both discredit France and reinvigorate trade with St. Domingue, rallied around
Toussaint and decried his treatment at the hands of the French. For Southerners, their
ambitious plans to expand into the Mississippi valley were dependent upon a weakened
France. Further, they celebrated Toussaint’s largely conservative administration of the
55
Virginia Gazette and General Advertiser (Williamsburg), July 3, 1802.
Richmond Enquirer, January 15, 1805; the story was also reprinted in the Louisiana Gazette (New
Orleans), March 5, 1805.
56
37
former French colony as he reinstated forced labor in an effort to harness white resources
and stabilize the economy. He was perceived to have treated fairly with white plantation
owners as he guaranteed the safety and property of his former owner. Finally, as one
author has put it, Toussaint Louverture’s success “was a victory of the New World over
the Old,” something all Americans could celebrate. 57
The death of the black general did not put an end to the literature on Toussaint
Louverture, nor did Americans cease discussing and debating the meaning of his life
throughout the antebellum period. Americans’ ongoing fascination with this charismatic
figure cannot be explained simply by Southern interest in economic expansion or antiFrench sentiment. It must be viewed in the context of the sense of vulnerability and
decline associated with slave-based economies at the time. As such, the embrace of
Touissant by Americans – northern antislavery advocates and free black abolitionists as
well as Southern apologists – takes on a new symbolism. To embrace Toussaint, while on
the one hand an expression of counter-revolutionary sentiment, also meant accepting a
degree of black sovereignty and self-determination. This concession, even as it only
applied to a foreign country, was remarkable in that it implicitly undermined some of the
core underpinnings of white supremacy, namely the belief in the inferiority and
incapability of blacks. To be sure, Toussaint meant many things to many people, yet the
fact that he could be so universally embraced by Americans across party, regional and
racial lines suggests a complex calculus on the part of U.S. policymakers, irreducible to
simple racism, anti-French sentiment, or commercial interests.
Yet just as developments in Haiti seemed to auger hope for those who yearned for
a way out of the predicament of American slavery, so too did events in the beleaguered
57
Hunt, 87.
38
former colony carry the seeds of a new ideological solidarity on the part of American
proslavery advocates. This reconfiguration of American attitudes toward the institution of
slavery achieved a foreign-political manifestation in the 1806 embargo of trade with the
then-independent Haiti and the nonrecognition of the newly-formed country. A dramatic
shift took place, from a pro-Haitian foreign policy during the Quasi War of 1799 and the
public embrace, even among Southern observers, of the stabilizing influence of Toussaint
Louverture, to a full trade embargo and the rapidly spreading public fear of slave revolt at
home. In many ways, to examine the U.S. response to the ongoing rebellion in Santo
Domingo “is to watch the drastic erosion of the ideology of the American Revolution.” 58
If so, the ideology which replaced it owes much of its substance to events in Haiti and
their intersection with domestic racial politics.
Among the earliest accounts of events on Saint Domingue were those of refugees
fleeing the violence ravaging their homes and plantations. Though these expatriates
traveled to the United States continually during the thirteen year-long Haitian Revolution,
the largest group arrived following the burning of Le Cap Haitien in 1793. Biographical
data on the Saint Dominguan exiles is sketchy at best, primarily because it is difficult to
differentiate them from the significant numbers of émigrés who traveled to the U.S. in
order to escape the French Revolution. What little biographical data that exists lists only
miscellaneous bits of information about the social and economic positions of some the
wealthier refugees. 59
The convoy from the Cap fire brought thousands of stricken colonists, though the
exact total of the emigration can only be inferred from some of the figures which have
58
59
Jordan, 375.
B. Maurel, Cahiers de Doléances de la Colonie de St. Domingue, 359.
39
survived. The exiles published a political defense which claimed to represent the opinions
of ten thousand refugees, and later claimed to speak for ten thousand French families,
thought the latter is certainly an exaggeration. 60 About two thousand Saint Dominguans
were receiving federal aid in the winter of 1794 as many planters were ruined by the
rebellion. 61 Though a precise number is difficult to pinpoint, enough came to publish
newspapers and pamphlets, support charitable organizations and social clubs, to figure in
American social and cultural life, to partake in political agitation and to worry American
officials into passing the Alien and Sedition Acts. As such, it seems reasonable to
consider ten thousand a conservative estimate.
Economically speaking, the refugees fell into three basic categories. The first
consisted of those arriving completely destitute and in need of assistance. Another
included those who, though arriving with limited means, nevertheless struggled along on
their own by capitalizing on their own skills or trades. The third group, smaller and more
socially prominent, was made up of individuals who had some resources and were thus
able to sustain a relatively higher standard of living. However, these divisions were not
always determined by preexisting social status – many wealthy planters were among the
destitute after their property was destroyed in the rebellion. 62 Fortunately for the former
colonists, aid was forthcoming in the U.S. as relief funds were raised privately and by
legislatures in many eastern cities now home to the exiles.
60
Affaires de Colonies, X, no. 12.
Constitution et réglements ou by-laws de la Société Française de Bienfaisance de Philadelphie precedes
d’une esquisse historique sur son origine et sa marche (Philadelphia, 1892), 87-90. This and other
pamphlets from the French Benevolent Society of Philadelphia are cited for figures on the size of the
immigration in Frances Sergeant Childs, French Refugee Life in the United States, 1790-1800. (Chicago:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940), 65.
62
Childs, 84.
61
40
Sometimes divided socially as well as between royalists and revolutionaries, the
Saint Dominguan refugees nevertheless shared in the horror of their experiences during
the slave revolt sweeping their former country. Typical of these accounts was that of an
anonymous young planter just returned to St. Domingue from France who, almost
immediately after his arrival, was swept up in the bloody events. “Many women,” he
writes, “young, beautiful, and virtuous, perished beneath the infamous caresses of the
brigands, amongst the cadavers of their fathers and husbands. Bodies, still palpitating,
were dragged through the roads with atrocious acclamations. Young children transfixed
upon the points of bayonets were the bleeding flags which followed the troop of
cannibals.” Though a stylized account, the author is quick to assure his reader that “these
pictures were not exaggerated, and I more than once saw the sorrowful spectacle.” 63
Whether embellished or not, these tales were retold in the United States by
thousands of refugees and reprinted in American papers. The previous account
reappeared in at least two U.S. newspapers in articles describing how the black rebels
used as their standard “the body of a white infant impaled upon a stake.” 64 Whether or
not the facts were portrayed accurately, the mix of revenge and racial hatred fueling the
mindless combat was not lost on American observers. The eyewitness descriptions of the
consequences of slave revolt – or in the conception of some, the consequences of slavery
– struck a chord with many Americans already fearful of such a conflagration. As such,
Saint Dominguan refugees and their woeful tales later served as one critical component in
both reorienting U.S. policy and in reconsolidating pro-slavery ideology.
63
Althéa de Puech Parham, ed., “My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from two Revolutions by a
Creole of Saint Domingue.” (Louisiana State University Press: 1959), 28.
64
Philadelphia Gazette of the United States, November 12, 1791; Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), January 3,
1793.
41
The fear of a slave revolt at home during the Haitian Revolution was palpable. 65
Tales of events in St. Domingue only fueled the suspicions of Southern whites and
provided a lurid example of what might befall their own slave society lest they lower
their guard. A Virginian who filed a deposition in connection with local plots in 1793
reported overhearing a group of blacks conspiring. “The one who seemed to be the chief
speaker said, you see how the blacks has killed the whites in the French Island and took it
a while ago.” 66 Though refugees brought only a handful of slaves with them to the United
States, at times these individuals were themselves implicated in plots. A newspaper
article from South Carolina indicated as much: “They write from Charleston (S.C.) that
the NEGROES have become very insolent, in so much that the citizens are alarmed, and
the militia keep a constant guard. It is said that the St. Domingo negroes have sown these
seeds of slave revolt, and that a magazine has been attempted to be broken open.” 67
Those who looked forward sought a way to mitigate the crisis they foresaw.
Following the toppling of slavery in Saint Domingue, Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary
of State, devoted a great deal of thought to the subject. “I become daily more and more
convinced,” he wrote to James Monroe in July 1794, “that all the West India islands will
remain in the hands of people of colour, and a total expulsion of the whites sooner or later
take place. It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children
certainly, and possibly ourselves (south of the Potomac,) have to wade through, and try to
avert them” by adopting gradual emancipation measures. 68
65
Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolt. Columbia University Press: New York, 1943, Chapter
II: The Fear of Rebellion.
66
William R. Palmer and Samuel McRae, eds., “Calendar of Virginia State Papers,” Vol. VI, 452-53.
67
The New York Journal & Patriotic Register, October 16, 1793, quoted by Mary Treudley, “The United
States and St. Domingo,” in The Journal of Race Development, 7, 124; Aptheker, 96.
68
Jefferson to James Monroe, 14 July 1793, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Ford, 7: 449-50.
42
Even Jefferson, however, could not escape contending with rumors of insurrection
connected to that on St. Domingue as he warned Governor John Drayton of South
Carolina in a letter of December, 1793. “A French gentleman, one of the refugees from
St. Domingo, informs me that two Frenchmen, from St. Domingo also, of the names
Castaing and La Chaise, are about setting out from this place for Charleston, with a
design to excite an insurrection among the negroes.” He goes on to indicate his source’s
lack of concrete evidence, yet, “…were anything to happen, I should deem myself
inexcusable not to have made the communication.” 69
The decade following the largest exodus of refugees from St. Domingue in 1793
was a period of more intense and widespread slave discontent than had ever existed
before. The reasons for this phenomenon are partly explained by the vulnerability of
slavery described earlier in this chapter including the revolutionary philosophy prevalent
at home and abroad as well as the economic depression that gripped the South for most of
this period. The uprisings in the West Indies, particularly on St. Domingue, played no
small part in fueling the discontent as well as the sense among many American slaves
that the time for outright resistance had come. Paranoia and rumors of slave revolt – as
well as a few very real plots – kept a fearful hold on the South. Perhaps the most
important year in this period was 1800 when the great conspiracy named after Gabriel, a
slave belonging to Thomas H. Prosser, was barely averted. The plot ended in failure
mainly because of a warning provided by two slave informants as well as poor weather
on the night of the intended insurrection. Nevertheless, the attempt, along with others
such as the Easter Plot of 1802, confirmed the fears of many Southern whites.
***
69
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Washington, 4: 97-98.
43
Meanwhile, events on St. Domingue proceeded inexorably toward a disastrous
end for the French expeditionary force charged with pacifying the colony. The actions of
the force and its leader, General Leclerc, seemed only to further infuriate the island’s
black inhabitants leaving them more determined than ever to resist their former colonial
overlords. The General’s betrayal of Toussaint Louverture, rather than calming the blacks
as he had expected, had caused them to become “enraged at the unfair manner in which
Toussaint was sent off to France.” 70 Along with the order to reinstate slavery handed
down from Napoleon Bonaparte, such actions led increasing numbers of blacks to
determine that their interests lay with the rebels. Just as importantly, yellow fever
ravaged the French forces, enormously reducing their effectiveness in disarming the
blacks who were continually re-supplied by American smugglers. Increasingly desperate,
Leclerc turned to acts of unspeakable brutality. “Numbers of the Negroes were daily
executed,” observed Captain Mather, an American shipmaster, “and the scenes of cold
blooded massacres which took place were never surpassed in that ill-fated colony.” 71
Black resistance, however, seemed only to increase in proportion to Leclerc’s growing
ruthlessness.
Sensing the opportunity to seize leadership of the rebellion, Jean-Jacques
Dessalines, an ambitious commander among the blacks still ostensibly loyal to France,
began plotting his defection. Under the guise of assisting the French, Dessalines began
systematically targeting rebel leaders who might threaten his position. In October 1802,
he made his move, mutinying to the rebels and immediately striking the French. He
continued to dispose of those guerilla leaders who defied him and at the Arcahaye
70
71
Boston Gazette, Sept. 20, 1802.
Boston Gazette, August 5, 1802.
44
Conference of late November Dessalines was formally recognized as the leader of the
black resistance. 72 For the first time since Toussaint Louverture’s arrest, the Haitian
Revolution was in the hands of one man.
At the same time that Dessalines was consolidating his political power, General
Leclerc was felled by the same yellow fever that had decimated his troops. He was
succeeded by General Rochambeau who, though an able military commander, indulged
in acts of genocide perhaps even more appalling than those of his predecessor. The new
commander instituted a policy of extermination, reportedly drowning blacks in the harbor
at Le Cap and even using a ship at Port-au-Prince as a gas chamber in order to more
efficiently pursue his goal. 73 He soon received 10,000 reinforcements from France
resulting in another year of combat. By late 1803, however, almost all of the
expeditionary force, along with many of the white population, had evacuated. With only
revenge on his mind, Dessalines had the remaining whites massacred and on January 1,
1804, the rebels formally declared independence, forming the black republic of Haiti.
This last spasm of violence, taken alongside the death of Toussaint Louverture
and growing fears of a major slave uprising at home soon led to a dramatic reversal of
official U.S. policy in the form of the embargo and nonrecognition of Haiti. This
consequence was itself the product of an ideological reconsolidation brought about in no
small part by events in St. Domingue. Immediate emancipation on the order of the
Haitian Revolution was horrifying to U.S. policy makers. They could not countenance the
self-emancipation of slaves or black domination of whites. Yet the embrace of the
Revolution’s most charismatic figure, Toussaint Louverture, across party and geographic
72
73
Ott, 176-177.
Boyer to Minister of Marine, Nov. 1802, in Le Moniteur, Jan. 11, 1803; Boston Gazette, Dec. 30, 1802.
45
lines, amongst supporters and detractors of slavery, even after his death, may do more to
indicate the state of American slavery than has previously been attributed this
phenomenon.
To be sure, the belief that a St. Domingue politically independent of France but
economically dependent on the United States would be less dangerous to the latter’s own
territory and slaveholdings was critical in bringing Americans to the support of
Toussaint. 74 Such issues were close to the surface for many Southern whites. Historians
have largely chosen to accept this explanation, however, without examining the very
fundamental way in which it undermined slavery. 75 Perhaps the most pervasive and
systemic method of control employed by American slavery was the fostering of the belief
in the innate inferiority of blacks. Theologians assured all – including the slaves
themselves – that blacks were cursed by God just as so-called ethnologists and historians
offered manufactured evidence of their natural inferiority. 76 To sacrifice this method of
control by acknowledging the independence of a nation of blacks and treating as an equal
its black dictator, engendered a contradiction that is difficult to explain away by invoking
the short-term material interests of Southern whites.
Was the vulnerability of the institution of slavery perceived to be so acute that
such measures were deemed necessary by Southerners? Did some southern apologists see
in Toussaint’s own imposition of strict social controls and forced labor, in lieu of outright
slavery, some sort of third way between indefinite bondage for American slaves and the
74
See correspondence between Rufus King, United States Minister to England and Timothy Pickering,
Secretary of State, during 1799, in King, ed., “Life and Correspondence of Rufus King,” 2, 499-501, 504505, 557.
75
See Matthewson, A Proslavery Foreign Policy; Jordan, White Over Black; Kerber, Federalists in
Dissent; Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America; Aptheker; American Negro Slave Revolts.
76
See Larry Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840. (University of
Georgia Press: Athens, 1987); Aptheker, Chapter III: The Machinery of Control.
46
cataclysm of race war? Or was the slaveholder’s capacity to compartmentalize the matter
of a black head of state apart from the conditions of their own slaves sufficient to
maintain this contradiction? Unfortunately, the record of correspondence between the
major political actors, newspaper reports, and indications of public opinion are
insufficient to definitively answer these questions.
At the very least, however, it must be concluded that events in Haiti were critical
in driving two diametrically opposed trends in the period of American history leading up
to the Civil War. The first, and certainly strongest at least in the years immediately
following the Haitian Revolution, was reactionary in nature and would soon lead to a new
ideological solidarity in support of slavery and the dismantling of the revolutionary
philosophy upon which America gained its independence. The second, though much less
thoroughly constructed, served to undermine the institution of slavery. At times this
occurred intentionally, as anti-slavery advocates intermittently wielded Haiti to their
advantage; at other times it was unintentional, as Southerners weakened perhaps the most
fundamental method of control over slaves by entertaining black independence. These
two trends and their inextricable and oft-noted connection to Haiti formed the core of the
debate that ended in the American Civil War.
47
CHAPTER 3
The declaration of an independent Haiti and the bloody reprisals that coincided
with it set the stage for the establishment of a definitively hostile foreign policy toward
the new nation. The embargo act of 1806, passed over the objections of Federalists from
both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, set the tone of U.S. interaction with Haiti for the
next half-century. Further, contemporary perceptions of events in the former colony were
filtered through ideas about the future of American slavery and contributed assiduously to
the sectional divisions among Americans. Most apparently, Haitian independence served
as a critical factor in the ideological re-arming of the Southern planter class and the
articulation of the positive-good argument for slavery. Though ostensibly clothed in a
debate over commercial interests and relations with France, important though these
factors were, it was the introduction of slave-holder anxieties that secured the embargo.
The fallout of the Haitian revolution was inextricably linked to the development of the
domestic debate on slavery and particularly to the nineteenth-century expansion of the
peculiar institution.
The establishment of a policy of non-recognition with respect to Haiti also
proved, in the years that followed, a point of departure between the United States and the
great powers of Europe. An examination of the nature of this divergence reveals a facet
of US slavery rarely scrutinized. The extent to which ongoing support for slavery at home
affected relations abroad further serves to demonstrate the character of the domestic
debate and its enduring connection to the specter of Haiti. The United States held back
recognition of Haiti, even when it was materially advantageous, longer than any other
major power, a move directly tied to the sensitivity of the race question at home.
48
The defeat of the Leclerc expedition and the subsequent declaration of Haitian
independence in January 1804, though originally supported by many Americans on both
sides of the issue of slavery, proved a turning point in relations with the former French
colony. While Haitians sought to establish friendly ties with their neighbors, their efforts
were complicated by the bloody and expansionist nature of the new regime. General
Jean-Jacque Dessalines quickly carried out his plan to massacre the remaining whites on
the island. Starting at Jéremié in the South, he traveled from town to town heading up the
savagery himself. Openly contemptuous of his place in history, he exulted: “What do I
care for the opinion of my contemporaries or of future generations?” 77
Perhaps even worse from the perspective of other slave societies, Dessalines
attempted to conquer Santo Domingo (modern-day Dominican Republic). 78 The Haitian
constitution of 1805 pledged non-interference in the affairs of other countries but its
authors also assumed that they would never be secure until the entire island was under
Haitian control. If that were not enough to stir the anxieties of southern Americans, Haiti
also came to be seen as a refuge for blacks and a beacon of freedom in the Caribbean.
The new nation’s government offered citizenship to any blacks who arrived on its
shores. 79
The pragmatic foreign policy of the Adams administration, which had concluded
that a weak, independent Saint Domingue was preferable to a colony dominated by the
pernicious French, was due for a reorientation under President Jefferson. While the latter
77
Quoted in Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment. (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1992), 31-32; Tim Matthewson, “Jefferson and the Non-recognition of Haiti,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 140, (1996), 24.
78
It is to be noted that U.S. contemporaries often refer to Haiti or the whole island as Santo Domingo,
using it interchangeably with St. Domingue or Haiti. This endured even in the scholarship on Haiti through
the 1940’s.
79
W. Jeffrey Bolster, “The Politics of Color: Black Sailors, the Republic of Haiti, and American Officials,
1791-1835” (Unpub, Paper, Annual Meeting O.A.H., Atlanta, Georgia, 14 April, 1994)
49
endorsed – in principle – variations on Adams’s realpolitik, Jefferson had to consider a
wider range of domestic factors, not least of which was the southern conservative
reaction which had gestated since the advent of the revolt in 1791. Following the
Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the enthusiasm for the expansion of slavery into these new
territories reached a fever pitch. However, this ambition had already been set into motion
by the collapse of Saint Domingue’s export economy following the outbreak of
revolution and was facilitated by the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. The South
Carolina legislature overcame its dread of slave revolt in 1803 and reestablished its
participation in the international slave trade. Over 40,000 manacled Africans arrived in
the next five years direct from the Guinea Coast, though it still barred slaves from the
Caribbean who were believed to be infected with the contagion of rebellion. With their
fresh slaves, southerners opened new cotton lands in Florida, Georgia, Alabama,
Mississippi, and Louisiana. The divisive congressional debates that coincided with this
expansion revealed two opposing philosophies about not just what to do with the lands
acquired from France, but about the broader question of future role of slavery in the
United States. These two philosophies also came to frame the ensuing debate on the
Haitian embargo.
Jefferson also had to contend with an ideological reconsolidation of pro-slavery
thought – itself deeply informed by interpretations of events in Haiti – that superseded his
earlier calls for gradual emancipation as a method of preventing a similar revolt in the
United States. One of this movement’s most eloquent proponents was South Carolina
Senator John Taylor. His series of seminal essays, first appearing in 1803, urged his
readers to conclude from the St. Dominguan experience that slavery would and must be a
50
permanent part of American life. “Negro slavery,” he writes, “is a misfortune to
agriculture, incapable of removal, and only within the reach of palliation.” In their
efforts to reckon with this misfortune, state legislatures had resorted to “the policy of
introducing by law into society, a race, or nation of people between the masters and
slaves, having rights extremely different from either, called free negroes and
mulattoes….It was this very policy, which first doomed the whites, and then the
mulattoes themselves, to the fate suffered by both in St. Domingo; and which contributes
greatly to an apprehension so often exhibited.” 80 Thus, the argument for gradual
emancipation was reinterpreted as a critical part of the existing problem.
Taylor again references Haiti while confronting other arguments presented by
Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia, including the idea that God favors the cause of the
slaves. “I shall pass over the enlistment of the Deity in the question with an humble hope,
that his justice and mercy do not require the whites and blacks to be placed in a relative
situation, as that one colour must extinguish the other;” he writes, “and as inclining to
think the enrollment of his name on the side of the slaves, somewhat like an inattention to
his own attributes, apparently siding with masters throughout the ages and amongst
nations hitherto, the liberating St. Domingo masters excepted.” He goes on to claim that
“Slavery was carried farther among the Greeks and the Romans than among ourselves,
and yet these two nations produced more great and good patriots and citizens, than,
probably, all the rest of the world.” 81 Here, Haiti is employed as an anomaly; something
80
John Taylor, Arator, Being a Series of Agricultural Essays, Practical and Political in Sixty-Four
Numbers. (1814; New York, 1977), 115 -116.
81
Taylor, 122. The idea that slaveholding may have had the positive influence on a republican society is an
important part of the end to post-American Revolution apologies for slavery and is considered in more
depth in Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1975).
51
to be feared and prevented at all costs, but an exception to the rule that God favors
masters rather than proof of the opposite.
Though the idea of a multiracial America had always been anathema to all but a
tiny handful of radical anti-slavery advocates, Taylor further employed St. Dominguan
imagery in arguing that slavery could only end in a cataclysmic race war and the
extinction of one or the other race. “But what will not enthusiasm attempt?” he asks. “It
attempted to make freemen of the people of France; the experiment pronounced that they
were incapable of liberty. It attempted to compound a free nation of black and white
people in St. Domingo. The experiment pronounced that one colour must perish.” He
goes on to admonish those in the North who would abide an alleviation of the servile
condition of southern slaves. “For what virtuous purpose are the Southern runaway
negroes countenanced in the Northern states?” he begs. “Do these states wish the
southern to try the St. Domingo experiment? If not, why do they keep alive the St.
Domingo spirit?” 82 Taylor here implies a myth that was propagated by French plantation
owners at the time of the rebellion as well: that abolitionists were directly responsible for
the bloodbath of Saint Domingue, an idea that became an entrenched part of master class
ideology in the United States. 83
Thus Taylor served as an influential purveyor of Southern conservative thought. If
the American Revolution ushered in a period remarkable for its diversity of views
amongst southern slaveholders, the independence of Haiti coupled with the forceful
oratory of conservatives like John Taylor put an end to Southern apologies. This newly
82
Taylor, 178-79.
David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1969), 35. See also, Althéa Puech Parham, My Odyssey, for the French Creole version of
this concept.
83
52
reconsolidated ideology was clear in its willingness to confront: “The fact is, negro
slavery is an evil which the United States must look in the face.” However, it was just as
explicit in its connection to Haiti. The traditional mechanisms of control like “Rewards
and punishments, the sanctions of the best government, and the origin of love and fear,
are rendered useless,” Taylor argues, “by the example of St. Domingo.” 84 Taylor, though
perhaps the most outspoken American to attempt to define the lessons of St. Domingue,
was far from the only one to conceive of Haiti and its relation to American slavery in
such terms.
Legislative shifts coincided with the ideological repositioning articulated by
Taylor and his colleagues. The southern conservative reaction was manifested in laws
like those passed in Virginia (1801, 1802, 1804, 1805, 1806), North Carolina (1802),
South Carolina (1800, 1805), Georgia (1802, 1804), Maryland (1805), and the
Mississippi Territory (1805). 85 This new body of legislation sought largely to re-impose
what were seen to be weakened methods of control. They were primarily aimed at slaves
and free-coloreds, requiring, for example, recently manumitted slaves in Virginia to leave
the state within the following year. It also encouraged new forms of surveillance and
control on free blacks whom southerners perceived to be dangerous incendiaries owing to
their perceived role in the St. Dominguan revolt.
A shift in national policy and the inscribing of the southern conservative mark on
US foreign policy was the next step in consolidating this ideological shift. Jefferson
opposed relations with the Dessalines regime and even ignored a letter from the dictator
84
Taylor, 180.
Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1974), 79-107; Matthewson, “Jefferson and the Nonrecognition of Haiti,” 25.
85
53
received just before Haiti’s declaration of independence. 86 Still, the president could not
disregard the close commercial ties between American merchants and the new Haitian
leadership. In the absence of French authorities to sanction their trade, US merchants had
opted to supply Haitian rebels, as well as their various opposite numbers, with all manner
of supplies including weapons of war. These ties were increasingly under attack as the
remnants of the Leclerc expedition, now scattered throughout the Caribbean, began
issuing letters of marque to privateers authorizing them to seize contraband of war. In
response, American merchants began arming for self-defense.
The protests of US merchants, whose valuable ships and cargo were regularly
being seized, soon reached President Jefferson. Despite the danger of this illicit trade, the
value of American exports to the West Indies reached $7.4 million in 1805, more than
double that of the previous year. 87 As French chargé, Pichon complained that American
merchants conducted a “private and piratical war against a Power with which the United
States are at peace” and threatened warlike actions if the Jefferson administration failed
to embargo trade with Haiti. 88 Jefferson first proposed a variation on John Adams’s
pragmatic policy toward Saint Domingue. He hoped to neutralize the island through an
international agreement mutually enforced by a consortium of powers. Specifically, he
sought to ward off the danger posed by Haitian commerce and navigation to the southern
states just as his proposal acknowledged that nothing could be done to repair the immense
86
Dessalines’s letter is described in Pichon to Talleyrand, 3 Nov. 1803, Archives de Affaires étrangères,
Correspondence Politique, états Unis [hereinafter cited as AE, CP, EU], 56: 95-97.
87
John H. Coatsworth, “American Trade with European Colonies in the Caribbean, 1790-1812,” William
and Mary Quarterly, 24 (1967), Table A-1, 262. U.S. government statistics on American trade with Haiti
were not separated from the French West Indies until 1817-1818. Most sources suggest that Haiti likely
represented the bulk of this trade.
88
Pichon to Madison, 7 May 1804, AE, CP, EU, 57: 9-12.
54
damage done to white hegemony in the Caribbean and, by extension, in every slave
society.
If the great powers had been at peace his proposal might have gotten off the
ground but with Britain and France pursuing their own agendas, they showed no interest
in the president’s proposal. In official communications the administration continued to
defend US trade with Haiti against Pichon’s criticisms. Secretary of State James
Madison, however, sent instructions to the U.S. minister in Paris to explore a compromise
on the issue. The new plan was to produce an agreement whereby the U.S. government
would prohibit the arms trade in exchange for a guarantee of the protection of
noncontraband commerce. But U.S. gun runners would no longer be tolerated. “With
respect to articles of War,” Madison remarked, “it is probably the interest of all nations
that they should be kept out of hands likely to make so bad use of them.” 89 Though both
the Adams and Jefferson administrations had stood against any embargo of U.S. trade
with the Haitian rebels, it was clear by 1804 that Jefferson was prepared to abandon this
stand.
The Spring massacres that followed the declaration of Haitian independence
marked the beginning of the end of concerted U.S. opposition to an embargo. While
Toussaint Louverture had been widely praised in American circles for his restraint and
stabilizing influence, both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line, his successor
Dessalines met with no such embrace. Many historians of early U.S. diplomacy were
unconvinced that the particularly bloody conclusion of the Haitian Revolution and the
increased fear of its spread constituted the “real reason” for the dramatic shift in the
89
Madison to Livingston, 31 May 1804, Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison (9 vols., New
York: 1900-1910), 7: 123-40.
55
administration’s position. 90 This, however, ignores the correspondence between Pichon
and French Foreign Minister Charles Talleyrand in which he indicated that Madison
himself had raised the issue of Haitian trade in the context of the Spring massacres and
confided that it was this event that had convinced the administration to ask Congress for
an embargo. 91
Jefferson was anxious to resolve the Haitian trade problem. He had no desire to
become embroiled with the great powers over this issue and, as a southerner, even less
desire to continue permitting contact with ex-slaves. The question was a pressing one
because it was conceivable that Federalists might recommend recognition at the
upcoming session of Congress; it was feared they might suggest a policy congruent with
the de facto recognition policy that had largely endured since 1793 and could even
provide for incendiary Haitian diplomats traveling under diplomatic passport in the
southern states. Still, his opening address to Congress in November 1804 presented only
the French case for suppressing trade and did not allude at all to the racial anxieties that
served as his overriding motive for seeking an embargo. American merchants were
arming vessels “to force a commerce into certain ports and countries in defiance of the
laws of those countries,” he said. The United States could not permit its citizens “to wage
a private war,” and he recommended Congress take remedial action. 92 Intent on avoiding
a clash over slavery as had recently occurred over Louisiana, he did not publicly request
90
Logan, Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 169.
Pichon to Talleyrand, 14 June 1804, AE, CP, EU, 52: 121-22. This report was confirmed by Americans
close to the negotiations as well, including Albert Gallatin (formerly of the Pennsylvania legislature, now
Treasury Secretary) to John Quincy Adams, Paris, 26 Sept. 1822, Gallatin Papers Microfilm; cited in David
Geggus, “Haiti and the Abolitionists: Opinion, Propaganda and International Politics in Britain and France,
1804-1838,” in David Richardson, ed., Abolition and its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790-1916
(London, 1985), 114; Matthewson, “Nonrecognition,” 29.
92
Jefferson to Congress, Nov. 8, 1804, Annals of Congress, 8th Cong., 2nd sess., 11.
91
56
that northern merchants sacrifice their commercial interests on behalf of the peculiar
security concerns of southern slaveholders.
Two weeks later, Boston Republican William Eustis introduced a bill in the
House to regulate the clearance of armed vessels. The next month the president’s son-inlaw, John W. Eppes, moved to prohibit vessels from arming altogether unless they were
bound for the piratical Mediterranean or the Orient. “We are informed,” he told Congress,
“that armed vessels sailing to the West Indies are sold, with their arms and ammunition,
to a class of people it is in the interest of the Unites States to depress and keep down.” 93
The motion was defeated and the House passed an amended version of the original bill
despite opposition from a coalition of commercial Federalists and Republicans. The
Senate significantly weakened the bill and then passed it with the Federalists again in
opposition.
Most Federalist newspapers continued to oppose any restrictions on trade, a
position determined largely by commercial interests. Those in the North were particularly
vociferous in upholding Haiti’s independence and the right of Americans to trade with it.
Boston’s Columbian Centinel even compared the Haitians’ experience to that of
Americans saying, “Their case is not dissimilar to that of the people of the United States
in 1780-1800.” 94 Few of their southern counterparts went so far but most Federalist
organs continued to resist any restrictions on trade. Cracks in the Federalist position
began to appear at this time, however, as the sectional nature of the debate became more
clearly stablished. The editor of the Norfolk Gazette and Publick Ledger, for example,
93
94
Speech of John W. Eppes, Dec. 13, 1804, Annals of Congress, 8th Cong., 2nd sess., 813.
Boston Columbian Centinel, Nov. 17, 1805.
57
thought there were “many reasons of policy, and perhaps of justice” for not
countenancing “the trade with the ports of St. Domingo in the possession of the blacks.” 95
Interestingly, Albert Gallatin, who once appeared to stand against an unfair
response to the outbreak of rebellion in Haiti and, like the Centinel, compared their
struggle to the American Revolution while in the Pennsylvania legislature, had amended
his views as Jefferson’s Treasury Secretary. While some Republicans like Senator
Samuel L. Mitchell of New York interpreted the curbing of U.S. commerce with Haiti as
bowing to illegitimate French demands, Gallatin responded in a fifteen-page analysis. He
insisted that U.S. trade with the revolted blacks was illicit and contrary to the laws of
nations because “San Domingo is a french colony…in a state of rebellion against the
Mother Country.” American merchants broke the laws of nations, he claimed, by arming
against duly authorized French privateers. Seemingly realizing his position contravened
precedent he shifted his tack; he concluded that it was “the magnitude of the evil” that
“calls for a remedy.” 96
The new law did not seriously interfere with commerce in either contraband or
innocent goods. The measure had been bandied about by both houses of Congress and
had “excited no little speculation and a more than ordinary share of ridicule in every part
of the country.” 97 Even before the bill got out of the House it had been so severely
weakened that a Republican conceded that “the opponents of the bill had nearly gained
their object.” 98 From the administration’s point of view, the bill was advantageous in that
it eliminated the potential embarrassment of defending Federalist gun runners. However,
95
Norfolk Gazette and Publick Ledger, Nov. 26, 1804.
Gallatin to Samuel L. Mitchell, Treasury Department, 3 Jan. 1805, Gallatin Papers Microfilm.
97
Philadelphia United States’ Gazette, Feb. 11, 1806.
98
Frederick-Towne Herald, Dec. 29, 1804.
96
58
it did little to assuage southerners’ fear of the Haitian menace, nor did it come close to
meeting the objections of the French. Louis Ferrand, the commander of the French forces
stationed at Spanish St. Domingo, repeatedly complained of American merchants’
continued willingness to brazenly flaunt the trade ban. In 1805, a fleet of merchant ships
returned to New York harbor and prominent Federalists, among them former minister to
England and vice presidential candidate Rufus King, publicly celebrated their successful
gun-running expedition. Among the toasts offered at the celebratory banquet was the one
offered by King who exclaimed, “[To] the Government of Hayti; founded on the only
legitimate basis of all authority…the people’s choice! May it be as durable as its
principles are pure.” 99 King’s endorsement of Haiti, though clothed in an exclamation of
democratic sentiment, was more likely an outburst of joy at having turned a profit and an
assertion of his right to trade with the island. Still, it indicates the growing divide
between the priorities of the merchant class and the security concerns of slaveholders.
Nevertheless, the brazen displayed only fueled French indignation.100
Knowing his hand in the Caribbean was weak, Napoleon Bonaparte expanded his
diplomatic offensive by offering to negotiate a handover of the Floridas if Jefferson
would acquiesce on Haiti and grease the wheels with 60 million francs. The president
opted to remain in the background this time and allowed center stage to be occupied by
the pacifist Republican Senator George Logan. The Logan bill, the provisions of which
included a full embargo on trade, passed the House and Senate with little opposition. The
only remarkable difference between the Logan bill debate and that surrounding the Eustis
bill was Logan’s willingness to play on southern fears of slave revolt. “Is it sound
99
The toast is included in an editorial column of the New York Evening Post, June 13, 1805.
Donald R. Hickey, “America’s Response to the Slave Revolt in Haiti, 1791-1806” Journal of the Early
Republic, Vol. 2, (1982), 374.
100
59
policy,” he asked Congress, “to cherish the black population of St. Domingo whilst we
have a similar population in our Southern States?” He similarly encouraged racial hatred
on the part of Northerners who had staunchly opposed the earlier ban. 101 According to
Federalist William Plumer, “several of the Senators from the Southern States declared
that almost the only reason that reconciled them to the bill was the fatal influence that the
independence of the Haytians would have on their own slaves.” 102 With the French
minister seated in the Senate gallery, the bill was hurried through both houses of
Congress.
Jefferson signed the new measure into law on February 28, 1806. The embargo
was renewed in 1807 and expired on April, 25 1808. Trade with Haiti continued to be
officially restricted under the embargo and non-intercourse act and, as such, it was not
until 1810 that trade with the black republic was again legal. Some goods still reached the
island during this period but the trade never again reached its earlier proportions. The bill
did not live up to the expectations of most of its proponents. It did not, as Napoleon had
hoped, result in the French reacquisition of Haiti, nor did it, as Jefferson had hoped, result
in the U.S. gaining control of the Floridas. Still, the adoption of the embargo of 1806 was
an important benchmark in Haitian-American relations in that it established a hostile
foreign policy that largely endured until the Civil War. 103
It also was important in shifting the frame of what was ostensibly a foreign policy
debate in a way that foreshadowed the sectional conflict over American slavery. Southern
members of Congress focused on what, to them, was the central issue: the threat Haiti
101
Speech of George Logan, Annals of Congress, 8th Congress, 2nd sess., 65; Frederick B. Tolles, “George
Logan of Philadelphia” (New York: 1953), 247,257, 261-262.
102
Annals of Congress, 9th Congress, 1st sess., 138.
103
Matthewson, “Nonrecognition”; Proslavery Foreign Policy.
60
posed to white hegemony and the status of their own servile populations. The Haitian
revolution was an ideological threat, an example of slaves who had displaced their
masters and they were completely unwilling to welcome Haiti into the family of nations
as anything resembling an equal. The true nature of the debate was revealed as John
Eppes engaged in personal attacks against the Logan bill’s opponents and adverting to the
“immediate and horrible destruction of the fairest portion of America.” 104 The most
notable opposition addresses were presented by Representative Harrison Gray Otis and
Senator Samuel White of Delaware, the latter of which was praised by John Quincy
Adams as “one of the most powerful and beautiful speeches I have ever heard made in
Congress.” 105
The divide was not between southerners interested in perpetuating slavery and
racially benevolent northerners, but rather between the aforementioned southern
conservatives and their northern opponents who were increasingly unwilling to sacrifice
commercial interests for the security of an institution for which they already felt a general
distaste. This divide, not just political but cultural and economic in nature, was to gestate
in the following decades. The Haitian Revolution and the complex foreign policy debate
that ensued in the U.S. played an integral role in beginning to frame the sides of the
debate on the future of American slavery, a confrontation that would have the most
dramatic of consequences on the development of the nation.
***
104
Speech of John W. Eppes, 24 Feb. 1806, Annals of Congress, 9th Congress, 1st sess., 499.
Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, 1: 414, entry of 20 Feb. 1806. For the speeches of Otis and
White, see Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 3rd sess., House, 2742-45 (for the earliest iteration of his
argument); and 9th Congress, 1st sess., Senate, 20 Feb. 1806, respectively.
105
61
In the 1830s, France and England offered formal recognition to Haiti. In the
United States, the growth of cotton capitalism and slavery increasingly made the
recognition of a free Black republic a political impossibility. The divergent paths taken
by the United States and the great powers of Europe further serve to indicate the extent to
which the impending question of race had entangled itself with U.S. foreign policy.
Even as early as the declaration of Haitian independence in1804, British policy in
the Caribbean was being guided by abolitionist James Stephen. It was his efforts that
allowed Prime Minister William Pitt to issue his order in council of 1805 barring enemy
colonies from re-supply with slave labor. His strategy sought to identify abolition with
the national interest by preventing the production of colonial wealth that would fuel the
French war effort. In 1807, Parliament abolished the slave trade to England’s own
colonies, a humanitarian measure that reflected the acceptance of the abolitionist position
within the English governing elite. The resultant new conception of the British empire as
focused on commerce, markets, and raw materials, rather than on land and slaves,
differed enormously from the United States which, though it had also banned the slave
trade in 1808, was actively expanding its slave society at this time. 106
Capitalizing on the collapse of French power in the region, Stephen expanded his
strategy in directions that transformed Anglo-American relations. He expanded the
definition of contraband to include tropical staples produced by slaves and transported to
Europe on American vessels. The application of this decision increased tensions between
the U.S. and Britain and would, in part, lead to the War of 1812. With American officials
106
See David Eltis and James Walvin, eds., The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origin and Effects in
Europe, Africa, and the Americas. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).
62
thus distracted, little contact between the Unites States and Haiti took place during the
decade following the embargo.
In 1817, Septimus Tyler, an American agent, was appointed to attempt the
collection of $132,000, a sum U.S. merchants believed Haiti owed them due to a number
of ship seizures that had occurred in the previous several years. Tyler failed because his
letter did not acknowledge Haiti’s current ruler, Henri Christophe, as the recognized
sovereign. In 1820 a group of American merchants again requested government action in
order to collect the claims, but John Quincy Adams, now Secretary of State, informed
Congress on March 27, 1820 that “A formal recognition of the kingdom of Hayti not
being deemed expedient, no further measures have been found practicable on the part of
the Executive in the case….” 107 Although Adams did not specify the reasons that
recognition was not expedient, the concurrent debates over the admission of Missouri and
the bitterness of many Americans on the subject of slavery thus revealed may have had a
great deal to do with his response.
Meanwhile, the continued struggle of the Spanish-American colonies for
independence raised questions for U.S. policy-makers similar to those connected with
Haiti. The circumstances were essentially the same, except for the question of race. In
1817 and 1818, the United States began recognizing the independence of many of these
former colonies and formed a commission charged with strengthening commercial ties
with them. Those who spoke on the matter, however, skillfully avoided any mention of
Haiti. Even Henry Clay, in his notable speech of March 22, 1818, could refer to the
traditional policy of the U.S. to recognize de facto governments without any reference to
the one Latin American nation whose independence had been established through
107
American State Papers, Foreign Relations, 4: 634 (hereafter cited as ASP, FR)
63
revolutionary struggle long before the others had even begun their efforts. Even more
remarkable was the speech of Senator Holmes of Maine in which he pleaded, “This
nation [the U.S.] now stands alone, the only established Republic on earth, like a solitary
rock in the ocean….Will it not then be a source of consolation, that we can hail one
Republic as a sister, take her by the hand and encourage her in her advance to
freedom?” 108 Obviously, Haiti could not be allowed to console the United States in her
republican loneliness, yet these speeches reveal an enduring facet of relations with Haiti.
Just as southern slaveholders who heaped such lofty praise on Toussaint Louverture in
the 1790s demonstrated their immense capacity to compartmentalize such praise
separately from efforts to strengthen the concept of black inferiority at home, so too did
Senators Holmes and Clay so easily detach black Haiti from a discussion of the pursuit of
liberal ideals in Latin-American states.
Trade with Haiti again began to take an important place in American commerce,
not least because, owing to the mercantilist policies of most European powers at the time,
it offered one of the few opportunities to establish unrestricted trade. Most of this
interaction involved northern merchants as southerners continued to fear contagion
amongst their slaves. Dread of slave revolt continued with the 1822 insurrection of
Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina, who was said to have come originally
from Saint Domingue, to have received aid there, and to have planned to travel there after
the plot’s conclusion. 109 As a result, South Carolina passed a law forbidding free black
sailors from coming to its ports under penalty of being captured and sold into slavery.
108
Annals of Congress, 15th Congress, 1st sess., 1463-1467, 1585.
Douglas R. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2004).
109
64
Pressure for recognition continued in the commercial sector. Northern merchants
like Caleb Cushing and John Dodge published eloquent defenses of Haitian recognition
and expressed the hope that the importance of mutual trade would soon override the
prejudices that stood in its way. 110 When their appeals had no effect, Haitian president
Boyer sent a direct request for recognition to John Quincy Adams. “The Haitian people,”
he wrote, “do not think that the American people, who in another epoch found themselves
in the same situation and felt the same need, can refuse them the justice that is due them.”
He then reverted to a much more vulnerable argument, asserting that while “there is no
similarity of color between the sons of America and those of Hayti, there is between them
the similarity of feeling and will….” 111 As might be expected, the president directed that
the letter not be answered.
While Congress ignored the question of Haitian recognition, the U.S. press
devoted considerable coverage to it. Notably, an article in the New London Advocate
pointed out the inconsistency of recognizing many former Spanish colonies while still
refusing Haiti. The writer concluded that if it was the color of the Haitians’ skin that
prevented American recognition, “this should never be given as a reason by men who
profess to believe in the principles of that immortal instrument, the Declaration of
Independence.” 112 The most important article appeared in Niles’ Register in which the
author asked whether the United States was ready to send and receive ministers from
Haiti. “Could the prejudices of some, and the perhaps, just fears of others be quieted?”
The answer was categorical: “We think not. The time has not yet come for a surrender of
our feelings about color, nor is it fitting at any time, that the public safety should be
110
Logan, 196.
Cape Haitien, Consular Dispatches, Vol. 5.
112
New London Advocate by Paulson’s American Daily Advertiser, Jan. 29, 1823.
111
65
endangered….” 113 The debate was becoming increasingly sectional as Pennsylvania, the
most southern state from which advocacy for recognition emanated, also marked the
southern boundary of abolitionism. The deep South continued to voice its determined
opposition.
The Monroe administration was no more inclined to acknowledge Haiti’s
independence. In the crucial year of 1823 when the Monroe Doctrine was formulated, the
president felt compelled to restate the official policy. Senator Holmes had recently
advanced a resolution seeking information about the status of relations with Haiti and a
fresh request for recognition had just arrived from President Boyer. In a special address
to Congress on February 25, 1823, he again categorically refused to afford recognition to
Haiti. For John Quincy Adams’s part, his role in formulating the refusal is unknown but
on the subject of the Holmes proposal he speculated that it was a “trap” set to endanger
his chances of securing the Democratic nomination for president in 1824.114 Adams had
clearly tempered his views on Haiti significantly since his Senate opposition to the
embargo of 1806, or at least came to view more clearly the political inexpediency of
taking a firm stand on Haitian recognition.
In 1825, despite the continued existence of slavery in the French colonies of
Martinique and Guadeloupe, Haiti’s former colonial overlord became the first to grant it
formal recognition. Many Frenchmen believed that a restoration of trade with the island
nation would redress an unfavorable balance of trade. The most significant factor in the
decision, however, seems to be the fact that so few blacks ever lived in France. The
notice of recognition was delivered by a fleet of fourteen warships which took such a
113
114
Niles’ Register, XXV, Sept. 27, 1823.
Adams, ed., Memoirs, 6: 119.
66
menacing position in the harbor of Port-au-Prince that President Boyer did not dare
refuse the onerous terms on which his government was afforded recognition. Foremost
among these conditions was the demand that Haiti pay an indemnity of 150 million francs
within five years. The special concessions accorded France, as well as recognition itself,
seem to have immediately raised suspicions among American observers. 115
U.S. policy-makers continued in their strategy of avoiding any mention of Haiti.
The debate over the naming of delegates to the upcoming Congress of Panama at which
all North and South American states were to be represented confirmed this. The Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations, upon learning that recognition of Haiti was to be on the
agenda for the meeting declared on January 16, 1826 that the “Untied States should never
permit themselves to enter into any discussion with any foreign State whatever, as to the
relations they should be obliged to establish with any People not parties to the
discussions.” 116 In other words, the Committee opposed the presence of Haiti at the
Congress and the formulation by any other nations of the policy that the United States
should adopt with regard to Haiti. Beyond these allusions to the black republic, Haiti was
not mentioned in the Committee’s proceedings.
The House members who participated in the debate over the naming of delegates
were even less subtle. Representative Forsyth of Georgia intended to leave no doubt that
“Southern feeling, prejudice, if gentlemen prefer the term, should prevent our Executive
from naming this topic in any assembly of nations.” 117 The Senate outdid the House in
vituperation as Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri explained that the United States
115
Adams, ed., Memoirs, 6: 193.
Annals of Congress, 19th Congress, 1st sess., (appendix, Register of Debates in Congress), 43 (hereafter
cited as Debates).
117
Debates, 2150.
116
67
could receive “no mulatto Consuls or black Ambassadors” from Haiti because “the peace
of eleven States in this Union will not permit black Consuls and Ambassadors to establish
themselves in our cities, and to parade through the country, and give their fellow blacks
in the United States, proof in hand of the honors which await them, for a successful revolt
on their part.” 118 Senator Hayne of South Carolina stated simply, “Our policy, with
regard to Hayti, is plain. We can never acknowledge her independence. Other States will
do as they please – but let us take the high ground, that these questions belong to a class,
which the peace and safety of a large portion of our Union forbids us even to discuss.” 119
To “take the high ground” for Hayne meant, of course, not discussing anything that might
threaten the maintenance of a Union founded on slavery and racial prejudice.
Britain was to follow France in reestablishing relations with Haiti when, in 1826,
it installed a consul-general on the island. In 1838, formal recognition was accorded. 120
British recognition of a free black republic was not the threat it was in the United States
since it had emancipated all of its slaves in 1833. Still, the United States refused to budge
an inch on the question. In 1832 Boyer attempted to induce President Andrew Jackson to
change the title of the commercial agents operating in Haiti to that of consul, thereby
securing a kind of implied recognition. In exchange, Boyer was willing to remove the
additional ten percent duty imposed on American imports. According to William Miles,
the American commercial agent at Les Cayes at the time, the naval commander who
118
Debates, 330-32.
Debates, 166.
120
The major works on U.S.-Haitian relations disagree here. Treudley, The United States and Santo
Domingo, 83; and Tansill, “The United States and Santo Domingo,” 122 cite 1826 as the date of British
recognition whereas Logan, “Diplomatic Relations,” 231 claims it was 1838.
119
68
carried the provisional agreement “soon returned with its quietus from Washington. The
sore spot was color.” 121
In 1838, France recognized the unconditional independence of Haiti and reduced
the indemnity to 60 million francs. The same year marked the beginning of bitter new
debates in Congress over recognition of Haiti. When petitions for the abolition of slavery
were silenced by the so-called “gag rule,” abolitionists presented more than two hundred
petitions for Haitian recognition in an effort to keep the slavery question beore the
public. 122 Hugh Swinton Legaré of South Carolina condemned the petitions as “a
plausible pretext and convenient opening to a continued discussion of that fatal question,”
abolition. 123 While these petitions suffered the same fate that befell those for the abolition
of slavery, the tactic indicates the extent to which the two issues were intertwined in
American politics.
By the 1840’s nearly all the nations of Europe, including Spain and Portugal
which still had slave holdings in their American colonies, had followed France and
Britain by extending diplomatic recognition to Haiti. Oddly, the countries which were
most materially damaged by the Haitian Revolution, namely France, owing to its
mercantile commercial interests on the island, were the first to grant it recognition. The
United States, which was only symbolically damaged by the revolt as an antislavery
symbol of black power, was the only nation to hold out as long as it did. Those who
formulated foreign policy in the European countries were often intimately connected with
Haiti in some way. For example, many French elites held St. Dominguan plantations on
121
William M. Marcy Papers, XLII, 42,014-42,015, Miles to Marcy, September 14, 1853.
The petitions are indexed in Adelaide Hase, comp., Index to United States Documents Relating to
Foreign Affairs (Washington, 1914-1921), 1: 720-721.
123
Hugh Swinton Legaré, “The Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré, ed. By M.S. Legaré bullen (New York:
1845-1846), 1: 322-328.
122
69
the eve of the Revolution and similarly, many British policymakers were military men
who had served in the Caribbean and seen for themselves the horrors of the slave revolt
and the regional conflicts it sparked.
In the United States, however, policy was largely formulated by men who only
conceived of Haiti in symbolic terms; that is, as a symbol of the dire consequences of
allowing such a rebellion to take place. Further, planters feared that if Haiti became a
symbolic object in the minds of their own slaves, it would help those slaves interpret their
own condition in such a way as to introduce new possibilities of a way out. The few
Americans with an intimate connection to Haiti, most of whom were merchants,
advocated tirelessly for recognition but were repeatedly silenced by the opposition.
Framing Haiti in terms of its symbolic importance to Americans, especially as the actual
event of the Revolution faded into memory, can go a long way to explaining the
divergence of the United States in relation to the imperial powers of Europe on the
question of diplomatic recognition of Haiti. 124
Though Haiti had its American advocates spread amongst the merchant class, and
eventually among anti-slavery advocates – some of whom found utility in employing the
question of recognition to propose an end to American slavery – the forces opposed to
this recognition were by far the more powerful in the period covered above. From the
post-independence embargo debate until the mid-nineteenth century those who sought to
reduce the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the state of American slavery were largely
able to control the foreign policy regarding Haiti. An issue which had, at one time, been
124
The analysis in this section is substantially influenced by the “theory of the politics of diplomacy in two
parts” advanced by Arthur L. Stinchcombe, “Class Conflict and Diplomacy: Haitian Isolation in the 19thcentury World System,” Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 37 (1994), 1-23. See also, “Freedom and
Oppression of Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean,” American Sociological Review, 59 (1994):
911-929.
70
more one of commercial interests and party affiliations became increasingly sectional as
the country hurtled toward a bloody confrontation on slavery. Even though few
Americans were directly connected to Haiti, the symbolic function Haiti came to serve in
U.S. politics can hardly be underestimated. Above all, the black republic had become
inextricably woven into the politics of race in America. This process was so complete
that the foreign-political and the domestic could no longer be clearly distinguished from
one another.
71
CHAPTER 4
The years immediately preceding U.S. diplomatic recognition of Haiti coincided
with an intensification of the domestic debate on the future of American slavery that led
in large part to the outbreak of the Civil War. Though petitions for recognition continued
to be advanced by abolitionists in Congress in an effort to keep the issue of slavery in the
public eye, Haiti functioned as more than just a tool of the anti-slavery movement.
Recognition was a key part of the abolitionist agenda and recognition was the first fruit
produced by the Southern secession as the lack of pro-slavery votes in Congress directly
resulted in the establishment of diplomatic relations. Whereas the conservative reaction
of the South had dominated U.S. foreign policy regarding Haiti from 1806, the
recognition afforded Haiti in 1862 represented an important part of the reversal of proslavery advocates’ fortunes that occurred during the Civil War.
While the specter of Haiti continued to fuel both sides of the domestic debate on
slavery right up until recognition, a third factor has yet to be fully explored. The Haitian
Revolution, as well as the very existence of the black republic it gave birth to, played a
crucial role in shaping and giving meaning to the Black nationalism that gained strength
in the 1850s. In an unlikely convergence, this force combined with the efforts of a wide
range of figures on both sides of the slavery debate resulting in a number of colonization
schemes aimed at emigrating freed blacks to Haiti and other locales in Africa and the
Americas. Persons ranging from President Abraham Lincoln to the militant black
nationalist preacher, James Theodore Holly, advocated, funded, and recruited emigrants
for colonization in Haiti. At every turn, racial politics mixed with material interests; the
fears of slaveholders who foresaw the end of an institution mixed with the hopes of
72
American blacks, and the disastrous end to the Haitian colonization experiment served as
a fitting conclusion to the often tragic story of the United States’ early relationship with
the world’s first black republic.
Almost immediately after the outbreak of revolution in St. Domingue, events on
the island became significant forces in the shaping of black thought and action in the
United States. The French refugees from the crisis, a number of whom brought their
slaves with them, were one source of firsthand accounts of the revolt. Although such
reports were not given directly to American blacks, the subject was discussed in public
and private gathering places where blacks were present as servants and in other
capacities. Literate blacks read of events in St. Domingue in newspapers and passed on
information by word of mouth. Slaves and free blacks in the U.S. were quite cognizant of
the major events and circumstances surrounding the Haitian Revolution, resulting in a
measurable increase in belligerency and acts of insurgence against American slave
society. 125 Though southern paranoia may be reflected in likely exaggerations of the
direct influence of St. Domingue on slave plots, it did serve as an inspiration for the
participants in the Denmark Vesey conspiracy, the Nat Turner rebellion and most other
major slave plots of the nineteenth century.
If Haiti had a symbolic and psychological significance for southern blacks, the
same was no less true of their free brethren in the north. Many free black spokesmen in
the North articulated a view of the Haitian Revolution comparable to the way whites saw
125
Monroe Fordham, “Nineteenth-Century Black Thought in the United States: Some Influences of the
Santo Domingo Revolution,” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 6, (1975), 118. See also, John T. McCartney,
Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African-American Political Thought. (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1992); K. Smith, “Becoming Native: The Concept of Place in Early African-American
Thought,” Unpublished paper presented at the Western Political Science Association, Portland, Orgeon.
(2004); Wilson J. Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History. (Cambridge:
University Press, 1998).
73
the American Revolution: that is, as a struggle for freedom against tyranny and injustice.
Among those who saw the revolt as a model for more militant action in the U.S. was
Henry Highland Garnet. In his famous “Address to the Slaves of the United States,”
given before the National Colored Convention in Buffalo in 1843, he called for American
slaves to follow the example of the Haitians and rebel against their masters. 126 Similarly,
Thomas Hamilton predicted that the black population would eventually outnumber the
whites, making it impossible “to put off that event which was brought about by
bloodshed in Hayti.” 127 In addition to orators like Garnet, the black press served as
another vehicle through which thoughts on the connection between Haiti and the
condition of American slaves was explored. The opening editorial in the first black edited
newspaper in the U.S. held that “the establishment of the Republic of Hayti after years of
sanguinary warfare; [and] its subsequent progress in all the arts of civilization,” were
indicators of the extent to which black inferiority was a myth. 128
In the 1850s, the black theologian James Theodore Holly, seized on the events in
St. Domingue, then over fifty years in the past, calling the revolution “one of the noblest,
grandest, and most justifiable outbursts against tyrannical oppression.” He further
contended that it was a struggle in which a race of “almost dehumanized men…rose from
their slumber of ages, and redressed their own unparalleled wrongs…in the name of God
and humanity.” In their “struggle for liberty, the Lord of Hosts directed their arms to be
instruments of his judgment on their oppressors.” Holly concluded that the black
revolution in St. Domingue was more “wonderous and momentous” than the American
126
The speech is excerpted in Herbert Aptheker, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United
States from the Colonial Period to the Civil War. (Citadel, New York: 1951).
127
Quoted in Aptheker, Documentary, 414-415.
128
New York Freedom’s Journal, Mar. 16, 1827.
74
Revolution. 129 As one of the strongest advocates of black emigration, Holly urged black
Americans with skills to migrate to Haiti and contribute toward establishing there a
“strong, powerful, enlightened and progressive Negro nationality, equal to the demands
of the nineteenth century.” 130
The growing popularity of emigration movements in the 1850’s was due to the
advocacy of a wide range of influential Americans, many of whom viewed the
colonization of blacks abroad as a chimera, though for disparate reasons. Black men like
Holly believed that the primary reason slavery and the slave trade still existed was due
primarily to the fact that there was as yet “no powerful and enlightened Negro nationality
anywhere existing to espouse the cause and avenge the wrongs of their race.” 131 In his
view, the emigration of free blacks from America could help forge a strong black nation
in the Caribbean capable of shaping international politics. Though African-Americans’
interest in emigration and the ideas of Holly waxed and waned, it would reach its peak in
1860 and 1862 when “Haitian fever” swept many black communities.
However, the idea of solving America’s race problem by means of colonizing
blacks abroad had preoccupied the minds of most U.S. leaders, both within and outside of
government, since the turn of the nineteenth century. The colonizationist effort was
institutionalized in 1816 with the founding of the American Colonization Society. Most
American presidents supported its efforts and its membership included Speaker of the
House Henry Clay, Chief Justice John Marshall, Rufus King and Patrick Henry, among
others. Some of its members believed blacks deserved a life free of the oppression they
129
James T. Holly, quoted in Howard H. Bell, ed., Black Separatism and the Caribbean, (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1970), 23-24.
130
Anglo-African Magazine, Vol. 1, November, 1859, 364-65.
131
Anglo-African Magazine, Vol. 1, November, 1859, 365.
75
found in America, while others sought to strengthen the existing racial hierarchy by
deporting free blacks, thereby avoiding what John Taylor called a “nation of people
between the masters and slaves, having rights extremely different from either, called free
negroes and mulattoes.” 132 Regardless of their motives, all agreed that black and white
could not live side by side.
Of all the colonization schemes pursued by the Society, the establishment of
Liberia in West Africa was one of the few to result in any appreciable success. The
colony of Liberia was founded within five years of the chartering of the American
Colonization Society, and in 1847 it proclaimed itself a republic. Britain extended
diplomatic recognition immediately but the Unites States was to hold back until the Civil
War, a fact that underscores the less-than-benevolent intentions of the colonizationists.
As for the colonization of Haiti, the Society did not seize on it immediately. The first
effort to migrate blacks to the island was led by James T. Holly who transported two
thousand colonists to Haiti in 1859. Though the effort was a failure and only about two
hundred of the original colonists could be accounted for a few years later, a more
concerted effort, backed by massive government funding, was soon to follow. 133
***
Meanwhile, the same circumstances that conspired to tear the country apart in the
Civil War also resulted in an environment that finally allowed for the diplomatic
recognition of Haiti, reversing the policy of nonrecognition that had set the tone of U.S.Haitian relations since 1806. Just as the possibility for reconciliation between the Union
and the Southern secessionists rapidly deteriorated, President Santana issued a
132
John Taylor, Arator, Being a Series of Agricultural Essays, Practical and Political in Sixty-Four
Numbers. (1814; New York, 1977), 115 -116.
133
Fordham, 120-24.
76
proclamation reasserting Spanish dominion over the Dominican Republic. Secretary of
State William H. Seward took a firm stand against Spanish annexation and in his
Thoughts for the Consideration of the President of April 1, 1861, he suggested that the
administration demand a categorical explanation from Spain. 134 Alarmed by Spain’s
ambitions, Haitian President Geffrard appealed on May 22 directly to President Abraham
Lincoln for recognition. 135 There is no evidence that Lincoln or Seward replied to this
appeal.
On May 25, James Redpath, one of the commercial agents of Haiti in the United
States, asserted to Seward that the Spanish reoccupation of the eastern half of the island
might result in war between Spain and Haiti and the possible seizure of Môle St. Nicolas,
of strategic importance to the U.S. navy. 136 A month later, George Usher, the former
American commercial agent in Haiti now acting in that capacity for Haiti in the U.S.,
suggested to Seward that any reestablishment of Spanish rule on Hispaniola would
threaten Haitian independence and be “an infringement of what is called the Monroe
Doctrine.” 137 Oddly, the Secretary of State who would eventually give new force to the
Monroe Doctrine as it applied to Mexico apparently saw no infringement of it in Spain’s
threat to Haiti. In his reply, Seward thanked Usher for an update on the conditions on the
island and confined himself to a non-committal reaction. “I beg to assure you,” he
responded, “that this Government regards with much interest and sincere sympathy the
134
“The Papers of Williams Henry Seward,” Microform Edition. In the Department of Rare Books and
Special Collections, University of Rochester Library, Rochester, New York (hereafter cited as “Seward
Papers”), Reel 183, Folder 6501.
135
National Archives, Haiti, Notes from, Vol. 1 (hereafter cited as “Haiti, notes to” or “Haiti, notes from”).
136
“Seward Papers,” State Dept, Business, 1861-1862, Reel 183, Folder 6297. See also, Haiti, Notes from,
Vol. 1.
137
“Seward Papers,” Usher to Seward, June 22, 1861, State Dept. Business, 1861-1862, Reel 183, Folder
6299. For a thorough treatment of U.S.-Haitian relations and the Monroe Doctrine, see Logan, Diplomatic
Relations, Chapter 8.
77
patriotic people of that Republic, who have, under an enlightened administration proved
themselves deserving the freedom they have acquired, and in the undisturbed enjoyment
of which we earnestly hope they will long be permitted to remain.” 138 Any material
efforts to ensure such a situation were not forthcoming.
When on July 10, 1861, a Spanish fleet compelled President Geffrard to
acknowledge Spanish rule in the Dominican Republic and agree to pay an indemnity of
two hundred thousand dollars, the United States remained silent. Nevertheless
communications urging recognition continued unabated from the commercial sector. On
September 4, Seth Webb, the newly-appointed American commercial agent at Port-auPrince, wrote Seward that the refusal of the United States to send a diplomatic
representative to Haiti was “altogether disastrous to the interests of our commerce, &
almost destroys the political influence of our government & its commercial agents.” He
went on to assert that “a prompt & cordial recognition of Haytian nationality by the
existing government of the United States…would diffuse among this whole people a
satisfaction which can hardly be understood in America & if followed up on our part by
even the ordinary civilities of official intercourse, would enable us to hold this island in
the hollow of our hand.” 139
In spite of these warnings and urgings, as well as the Spanish expedition to the
island, Lincoln waited until the opening of the regular session of Congress to recommend
diplomatic recognition. In his message of December 3, 1861, he told the legislators, “if
any good reason exists why we should persevere longer in withholding our recognition of
the independence and sovereignty of Hayti and Liberia, I am unable to discern it.
138
139
“Seward Papers,” State Dept. Business, 1861-1862, Reel 183, Folder 6299.
“Seward Papers,” State Dept. Business, 1861-1862, Reel 183, Folder 6301.
78
Unwilling, however, to inaugurate a novel policy in regard to them without the
approbation of Congress, I submit for your consideration the expediency of an
appropriation for maintaining a chargé d’affaires near each of these new States. It does
not admit of doubt that important commercial advantages might be secured by favorable
treaties with them.” Lincoln went on to note his hope that it would exercise “a salutary
influence on the opinion of foreign nations,” and would “fulfill the dictates of propriety
and justice.” 140
Despite the administration’s lack of haste in extending recognition to these two
black countries, as well as having mistakenly labeled them “new States,” the move
represented a major turning point in U.S. interaction with Haiti. The commercial motive
for recognition requires no explanation. Such considerations were an ever-present aspect
of U.S.-Haitian relations as far back as the Caribbean island’s time as a French colony.
Recognition’s impact on foreign affairs is understandable as well, and ties to the most
likely reason for Lincoln and Seward’s reluctance to propose it sooner. The European
powers, in particular Great Britain, were beginning to show sympathy for the
Confederacy, in part because the Lincoln administration had not yet made clear the
connection between slavery and the Union cause. While the President believed the
moment for emancipation had not yet arrived, he likely hoped the recognition of Haiti
and Liberia would cultivate some support for the Union in the progressive circles of
Great Britain and France. 141 Though in referring a matter to Congress which he could
have decided himself Lincoln may appear to have exercised undue timidity, it is more
likely he was deeply aware of the effect recognition would have in the all-important
140
James Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897, 10
vols. (Washington: 1896-99), 6: 47.
141
Logan, 298-99.
79
border states which still held slaves but had, as yet, not seceded from the Union. Lincoln,
who withheld the preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation until September,
1862, was not inclined to move too far ahead of public opinion, especially in any action
that might affront the border states. As Seward wrote to Charles Francis Adams,
American minister to Britain, “Every demonstration against slavery puts our assured
position in Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Virginia at hazard.” 142 The recognition of
Haiti and Liberia was, of course, considered by pro-slavery advocates as an assault
against that institution as evidenced by the ensuing Congressional debate.
With the Civil War in full swing, the Senate’s discussion of the President’s
proposal reflected the sectional differences that had come to frame any matter involving
Haiti. Senator Garret Davis, a Democrat from Kentucky employed language reminiscent
of Hayne and Benton in 1826, declaring Washington society’s unease with the idea of a
black foreign minister. Similarly, Senator Saulisbury, a Democrat from Delaware,
objected to the presence of a black minister in the Senate gallery reserved for
diplomats. 143 The Republican Senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, managed to
overcome this opposition. His speech of April, 23, 1862, made no plea based on serving
justice to blacks either in Haiti or the United States, but instead emphasized commerce,
the deterrent effect recognition would have on any Spanish or other European intrigues
on the island, and the fact that the U.S. was the only major power not to have already
recognized Haiti’s sovereignty. 144
142
“Seward Papers”, Seward to Adams, January 1862, State Dept. Business, 1861-1862, Reel 183, Folder
6326.
143
Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 2nd sess., 1806-1807, 1815.
144
Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 2nd sess., 1773-1776, 1814-1815.
80
While it is difficult to determine the relevant weight of these arguments –
including the decidedly muted one concerning racial justice – in the minds of the thirtytwo senators who voted for the measure, it is clear, however, that the seven who voted
against it stood on the same “lofty principles” of Hayne and Benton in 1826. The House
debate followed roughly the same parameters as the one in the Senate and a party-line
vote resulted in thirty-seven votes against the assent of eighty-six Republicans and
abolitionists. 145 President Lincoln signed the bill for the appointment of commissioners to
Haiti and Liberia on June 5, 1862 and six weeks later Benjamin Whidden became the first
diplomatic representative from the United States to Haiti. Recognition would have been
impossible before secession resulted in the exodus of most Democratic members of
Congress and a letter from Seward to one of his principle advisors, Thurlow Weed,
confirms that recognition was a key part of the abolitionist agenda. Writing just two days
after Sumner effectively silenced the Senate opposition, Seward exulted that “Hayti and
Liberia are recognized,” listing it alongside the suppression of the African slave trade and
the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, all accomplishments he attributes to
the fact that Democratic opposition was then “only small enough to annoy and excite.” 146
***
Another item, however, remained an important aspect of Lincoln’s agenda. As
explained above, Lincoln, like many other U.S. statesmen, was thoroughly convinced that
blacks and whites would never be able to co-exist peacefully in America. The war-time
confiscation of plantations along with the Confederate’s human property made the
145
For the register of the votes in the Senate and House, see respectively Congressional Globe, 37th
Congress, 2nd sess., 1816, and 2527-2536.
146
“Seward Papers,” Seward to Weed, April 25, 1862.
81
question of what to do with the newly freed slaves all the more pertinent. In April 1862,
as a result of his persuasive efforts, the U.S. House of Representatives created the select
Committee on Emancipation and Colonization for the express purpose of thoroughly
examining all aspects of colonization in order to determine its feasibility.
In the spring and summer of 1862, Congress provided Lincoln exactly what he
sought: legislation linking emancipation, confiscation, and colonization. The same series
of acts that freed the slaves in Washington, D.C. and those held by rebellious slave
owners, also resulted in the appropriation of $100,000 to design and implement
colonization programs. 147 Then in July, an act of Congress – the most far-reaching of the
entire series – not only increased the funds to $600,000 but designated Abraham Lincoln
the sole trustee of all colonization efforts. 148 Though colonization had been favored by
American presidents reaching back to Thomas Jefferson, none had ever been provided
the resources and authority to enact such schemes as had Lincoln in 1862. Unfortunately,
he was to grossly mismanage the resources resulting in a disastrous end to his
colonization efforts and yet another tragic chapter in U.S.-Haitian relations.
Lincoln first looked to Central America for an acceptable place to colonize freed
blacks. Ambrose W. Thompson owner of the Chiriqui Improvement Company in
Panama, convinced Lincoln to authorize the signing of a contract between the United
States and his company, which among other provisions set aside land for the
establishment of a black colony. Lincoln’s enthusiasm for the colonization scheme
clouded his judgment as he disregarded an ongoing border dispute over the contracted
land, as well as the advice of the Secretary of the Navy concerning the shady character of
147
148
U.S. Statutes at Large. (1850-1873). Vol. 13 (Boston: Little Brown), 14-15.
U.S. Statutes, 378, 582, 592.
82
Thompson. Lincoln, however, was more concerned with hurrying blacks out of the
country as fast as possible rather than with the capability of the site to successfully
support a colony. The colonists were supposed to have supported themselves by mining
local coal deposits, but when a box supposed to contain coal from the Chiriqui site turned
out to be full of nothing but dirt, the President nevertheless persisted in his efforts. It was
not until Seward, concerned for the goodwill of Latin America, advised Lincoln to abort
the project that he reluctantly abandoned the plan. 149
With Central America no longer an option Lincoln instructed Seward to feel out
the European powers on the subject of signing treaties to allow black emigration to their
American colonies. When he received a lukewarm response, Lincoln turned to Haiti.
Having first rejected it as a colonization destination because of its Roman Catholicism
and the possibility of Spanish annexation, he now concluded it was the best choice. His
decision would turn out to be among the greatest blunders of his presidency and the last
colonization effort attempted by the United States.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Lincoln’s tireless campaign to induce
blacks to leave America and settle on foreign shores included an invitation to a group of
free blacks to visit with him in the Oval Office. Occurring a month after he won the
victories in Congress providing him with the resources he needed to pursue colonization,
the historic meeting represented the first time a U.S. president discussed a matter of
public interest with black people. The summit quickly devolved into a lecture from the
President on the incompatibility of whites and blacks and the virtues of colonization.
“And why,” he asked, “should the people of your race be colonized and where?...We
149
James D. Lockett, “Abraham Lincoln and Colonization: An Episode that Ends in Tragedy at L’Ile a
Vache, Haiti, 1863-1864.” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 21 (1991), 432-33.
83
have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races.
Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great
disadvantage to us both, I think. Your race suffers greatly, many of them, by living
among us, while ours suffer from your presence.” 150 The men were far from convinced
by Lincoln’s short-sighted monologue and retired to their communities promising only to
consider his appeal. 151 The anti-slavery press reacted with fury and Frederick Douglass
reflected the overwhelmingly hostile attitude of northern Negroes and abolitionists when
he bitterly noted that “In this address Mr. Lincoln assumes the languages and arguments
of the itinerant Colonization lecturer, showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race
and blood, his contempt for negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” 152
Despite this cool reception from free blacks and abolitionists, plans for
colonization in Haiti went forward. On December 31, 1862, the Department of the
Interior entered into a contract with Bernard Kock, who had persuaded President Geffrard
to lease him the L’Ile à Vache, an island off Haiti’s southern coast. Kock was to receive
fifty dollars per emigrant, up to fifty-thousand voluntary colonists. Since Kock did not
have sufficient capital for his undertaking, he induced a group of New York capitalists,
headed by P.S. Forbes and Charles K. Tuckerman, to finance the project. They invested
$70,000 for the purchase of a ship but by the time it was ready to sail, Lincoln had
cancelled the contract. Rumors of Kock’s untrustworthiness, as well as the admonitions
150
Washington National Republican (August, 1862), 1-4, see also Roy P. Basler, ed., “The Collected
Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, 1955), 5:48.
151
James M. McPherson, “Abolitionist and Negro Opposition to Colonization during the Civil War.”
Phylon (1960-), Vol. 26 (1965), 395.
152
Liberator, August 22, 1862; Douglass’ Monthly, September, 1862.
84
of Seward who had never shared Lincoln’s enthusiasm for colonization, finally prevailed
over the President’s ambitions.153
Forbes and Tuckerman, in an effort to prevent the loss of their investment,
convinced the government to resign the contract with them instead. In a show of their
ineptitude, they promptly rehired Kock as administrator of the colony and in April, 1863,
a ship carrying about four-hundred fifty colonists departed for L’Ile à Vache. The
expedition seemed doomed to failure from the start as a carrier of small pox was
somehow allowed on board resulting in twenty deaths. No real preparations had been
made for the colonists’ arrival and Forbes and Tuckerman had failed to secure an
agreement with Haitian officials on the transfer of the original lease. Kock, who had been
referring to himself as “governor” of the island, was soon forced by the angry settlers to
seek protection from Haitian authorities after he reportedly duped the settlers out of all
the U.S. currency they brought on the voyage.
Forbes and Tuckerman replaced Kock with A.A. Ripka, who for a few months
tried to develop the colony, but he soon determined the situation to be hopeless and gave
up. For the next three and a half months the freedmen were alone on the island. Acting on
information received from American consular and diplomatic officials in Haiti, Lincoln
then dispatched D.C. Donnohue to investigate conditions on the island. After a time,
Donnohue gained control of the project causing him to suffer delusions of grandeur,
calling himself the absolute monarch of the island. 154 By January 1864, conditions on
L’Ile à Vache were declared a disaster and the project was terminated. Lincoln sent an
153
Lockett, 437-438; Logan, 308-309.
Record of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior Relating to Suppression of the African Slave Trade
and Negro Colonization, 1854-1872. (1961, Microfilm edition). Washington, D.C.: The National Archives.
Donnohue to Usher, January 5, 1864; cited in Lockett, 440.
154
85
army transport to return the remaining colonists to the United States and Congress not
only repealed the act that gave Lincoln $600,000 for colonization and appointed him sole
trustee, it also passed an act that forbade the U.S. government from any further
involvement in colonization schemes. 155
The unmitigated calamity that was the L’Ile à Vache colonization effort serves as
a fitting conclusion to the story of the United States’ early interaction with the black
republic. Haiti, long a symbol of the dangers of holding a population of humans in
bondage, was neither a concrete threat to U.S. slavery nor the chimera American
colonizationists believed it to be. Nevertheless, the function of Haiti in American society
and politics went through new evolutions as the Civil War approached. While
slaveholders in the Antebellum South may have been able to compartmentalize the
Haitian revolt in an effort to maintain the apparatus of control, abolitionists and free
blacks increasingly seized on events in the former French colony to undermine assertions
of black inferiority. At every turn, U.S. interaction with Haiti, ostensibly a foreign policy
matter, was largely determined by and refracted through the racial politics of the time.
Haiti was a logical choice for black emigration from the perspective of
colonizationists, whether white or black, only for different reasons. For black nationalists,
Haiti represented the hopes of a race and manifested the deconstruction of the myth of
black inferiority. For whites like Abraham Lincoln, their short-sighted racism led them to
believe Haiti offered an economically and geographically feasible place of disposal for
millions of unwanted blacks. The brief convergence of interest in migration among some
free blacks and the enthusiasm for such an effort within the Lincoln administration
resulted in an experiment which, though ending in disaster, also marked a landmark in the
155
U.S. Statutes, 352.
86
United States’ struggle with racial reconciliation. With colonization no longer an option,
Americans knew they had one less path toward establishing a society free of slavery. Any
possible solution to America’s deepest and most intractable conundrum would now
necessarily involve a multi-racial society.
87
CONCLUSION
It is no coincidence that the first epoch of American history, from the Revolution
that gave birth to a nation, to the Civil War that nearly split it in two, roughly coincided
with the period between the slave insurrection in Saint Domingue and its eventual
diplomatic recognition. Just as the Haitian Revolution was connected to other revolutions
of the period, including that in America, so too was its subsequent history intertwined
with developments in U.S. society. It is not enough, however, to conclude that racism and
the defense of slavery resulted in a reactionary policy toward the black republic. Events
in Haiti were crucial in shaping the domestic debate on the future of slavery and were
critical to the development of the sectional conflict in the United States that led to the
Civil War.
From the outset, the bloody Haitian Revolution framed the issues at hand and
represented for slaveholders what was at stake. The symbolic importance of Haiti – that
is, Haiti as an example of the consequences of widespread slave revolt upon white
hegemony – was powerful enough to allow anxious slaveholders to essentially dominate
the formulation of U.S. foreign policy toward Haiti for three quarters of a century. The
fear of those for whom Haiti served only a psychological function overcame the
commercial interests of many who had direct contact with the former colony.
To be clear, many factors contributed to the complex debate over U.S.-Haitian
relations. In the beginning, partisan politics and disputes with the great powers of Europe
were important in drawing the battle lines. Later, sectionalism came to be an important
factor and commercial interests were always in play. However, the race question was
never far from the surface, even when the actors involved did not expressly say so. The
88
American Revolution and other related developments in Western society hung a question
mark over the institution of slavery. The contradictions of a nation founded on “liberty
for all” that was, at the same time, deepening its economic commitment to slavery were
not lost on all contemporary observers. At the same time, however, the concept of a
multiracial society was unfathomable to nearly all Americans, giving rise to efforts to
colonize free blacks outside of the country.
It was in this context that the Haitian Revolution occurred. The responses of two
groups, the Pennsylvania and South Carolina legislatures, reacting before the fledgling
federal government and even before news of the event spread widely, foreshadowed the
debate to come. In South Carolina, where personal commitments to slavery ran deep, the
legislators considered sending their militia to assist but held back only because of the fear
of a similar revolt at home. In Pennsylvania a more complex exchange ensued. While
most of those involved were quick to denounce a slave revolt that resulted in the deaths
of whites, some members took the opportunity to express their anti-slavery convictions,
thus transposing their opinion on a domestic institution to the arena of foreign policy.
This exchange also was the first instance in which a U.S. policymaker compared
the Haitian Revolution to that of the thirteen colonies against British rule. This would
take place time and again over the course of the debate over relations with Haiti and was
a way for opponents of a hostile policy to shift the discussion away from the sensitive
race question. Measuring the sincerity of such arguments, like gauging the authenticity of
any expression of sympathy toward the Haitians or, for that matter, toward American
blacks, remains difficult. Nevertheless, the developing disagreement over how to react to
the Haitian slave revolt reveals a great deal about domestic views of slavery.
89
Perhaps the most intriguing period in the history of U.S.-Haitian relations remains
the few years between the initial revolt and the embargo passed by Congress in 1806. It
was during this time that pro-slavery advocates were still in the process of consolidating
an ideological defense of slavery, a process in which Haiti figured prominently. Also,
ambivalence about the future of slavery was at its height as many slaveholders considered
proposals for gradual emancipation. In this context, the wholehearted embrace of
Toussaint Louverture on the part of Americans on both sides of the slavery debate takes
on greater significance than is traditionally attributed it. To be sure, race was not the only
consideration on the minds of Southerners for whom party loyalty, Francophobia, and the
hope of expanding slavery into the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase all factored into
their calculus. Still, the circumstances beg the question: what would have happened had
Toussaint remained in power and Dessalines not massacred the remaining whites in
Haiti?
In the view of the author, events in Haiti – though not the only factor – were a
major consideration for Americans charting the course of slavery. At every turn, Haiti
was seen as a model for the consequences of sudden emancipation and the resultant
multi-racial society. When conditions in Haiti were stable, as in the period of Toussaint’s
rule and later that of Presidents Boyer and Geffrard, they provided a certain degree of
cover for Americans who were publicly opposed to slavery at home. Still, the fact
remained that a conciliatory policy toward the black republic was simply not pragmatic
until the Civil War. This is evidenced by the shifting positions of actors like Albert
Gallatin and John Quincy Adams. Both stood against a hostile policy toward Haiti at first
90
– at least partially on the grounds of racial justice – and both changed their tune when
they found themselves in the executive branch.
Haiti served an inspirational function for American blacks as well, as it implicitly
undermined the myth of black inferiority which served as a key part of the machinery of
social control in the Antebellum United States. Just as Southern whites were employing
the image of Haiti in order to strengthen master-class ideology, blacks interpreted it
through the lens of their own condition. Thus, Haiti’s influence on nineteenth-century
black thought and the rise of black nationalism should not be underestimated. Many
slaves were thus inspired to revolt, while some free blacks became enamored with
emigration to the world’s first nation founded upon a slave revolt. Ironically, the
disastrous end to American colonization efforts at L’Ile à Vache, though designed to
avert the imposition of a multi-racial society, resulted in just the opposite. The
termination of colonization left U.S. policymakers no other option but to consider the
idea of living side by side with African-Americans.
Though American involvement with Haiti has taken numerous tragic turns in the
years since, the diplomatic recognition afforded the country, made possible by the Civil
War, represented a turning point in relations. Though the official policy of the previous
five decades was reversed, however, it is difficult to conclude anything but the fact that
racism was the overriding sentiment in U.S.-Haitian relations. Still, in every case, events
in Haiti took on deep symbolic significance in U.S. politics and were interpreted through
the lens of one’s own conception of the race question. The various answers provided to
that question – at times merely a reflection of simplistic racial hatred, but in most cases
the product of complex considerations – reveal the multifarious nature of the relationship
91
between Haiti and the early United States. The trajectory of this racialized foreign policy
is only apparent when one can view the entire arc of the nonrecognition policy by
studying the period between the Haitian Revolution and its eventual diplomatic
recognition.
92
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